OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 


OLD    AND    NEW 
MASTERS 


BY 

ROBERT    LYND 


NEW  YORK 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

597-599  FIFTH   AVENUE 


(All  ri^lils  resented) 

PRINTED  l\  GREAT  BRITAIN 


pa/ 


TO 

SYLVIA    LYND 


The  various  chapters  in  this  book  have 
appeared  in  slightly  different  form  in 
the  Daily  News^  the  Nation^  the  New 
Statesman,       and      Land      and      Water. 


R.   L. 


CONTENTS 

FAGX 

I.    DOSTOEVSKY   THE   SENSATIONALIST         .  .  .9 

II.     JANE   AUSTEN  :   NATURAL   HISTORIAN       .  .  .17 

III.  MR.  G.  K.  CHESTERTON  AND  MR.  HILAIRE  BELLOC   .     25 

(i)  The  Heavenly  Twins 

(2)  The  Copiousness  of  Mr.  Belloc 

(3)  The  Two  Mr.  Chestertons 

IV.  WORDSWORTH     . 42 

(i)  His  Personality  and  Genius 
(2)  His  Politics 

V.  KEATS  ........    58 

(i)  The  Biography 

(2)  The  Matthew  Arnold  View 

VI.  HENRY   JAMES    .......    7° 

(i)  The  Novelist  of  Grains  and  Scruples 

(2)  The  Artist  at  Work 

(3)  How  He  was  Born  Again 

VII.  BROWNING  :   THE   POET   OF   LOVE  .  .  .86 

Vm.  THE   FAME   OF  J.   M.   SYNGE  .  .  .  .94 

IX.  VILLON:  THE   GENIUS   OF   THE   TAVERN  .  .     98 

X.  POPE  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .105 

XI.  JAMES   ELROY   FLECKER II2 

XII.  TURGENEV  .  .  ...  117 


8 


OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 


XIII.  THE   MADNESS   OF   STRINDBERG 

XIV.  "THE   PRINCE   OF   FRENCH    POETS" 
XV.  ROSSETTI    AND    RITUAL 

XVI.  MR.   BERNARD   SHAW 

XVII.  MR.   MASEFIELD'S   SECRET  . 

XVIII.     MR.  W.  B.  YEATS 

(i)  His  Own  Account  of  Himself 
(2)  His  Poetry 

XIX.  TCHEHOV:  THE  PERFECT  STORY-TELLER 

XX.  LADY  GREGORY     .... 

XXI.  MR.  CUNNINGHAME  GRAHAM 

XXII.  SWINBURNE 

(i)  The  Exotic  Bird 

(2)  Genius  without  Eyes 

XXIII.  THE   WORK   OF   T.  M.   KETTLE      . 

XXIV.  MR.  J.  C.  SQUIRE  .... 

XXV.     MR.   JOSEPH    CONRAD 

(i)  The  Making  of  an  Author 
(2)  Tales  of  Mystery 

XXVI.     MR.   RUDYARD   KIPLING 

(1)  The  Good  Story-teller 

(2)  The  Poet  of  Life  with  a  Capital  Hell 

XXVII.     MR.   THOMAS   HARDY 

(i)  His  Genius  as  a  Poet 
(2)  A  Poet  in  Winter 


PAGE 
123 

130 

142 
149 

178 
184 
188 


200 
206 
212 


224 


234 


OLD   AND    NEW    MASTERS 


DOSTOEVSKY    THE    SENSATIONALIST 

Mr.  George  Moore  once  summed  up  Crime  and 
Punishment  as  "  Gaboriau  with  psychological  sauce." 
He  afterwards  apologized  for  the  epigram,  but  he  insisted 
that  all  the  same  there  is  a  certain  amount  of  truth 
in  it.     And  so  there  is. 

Dostoevsky's  visible  world  was  a  world  of  sensation- 
alism. He  may  in  the  last  analysis  be  a  great  mystic 
or  a  great  psychologist  ;  but  he  almost  always  reveals 
his  genius  on  a  stage  crowded  with  people  who  behave 
like  the  men  and  women  one  reads  about  in  the  police 
news.  There  are  more  murders  and  attempted  murders 
in  his  books  than  in  those  of  any  other  great  novelist. 
His  people  more  nearly  resemble  madmen  and  wild  beasts 
than  normal  human  beings. 

He  releases  them  from  most  of  the  ordinary  inhibitions. 
He  is  fascinated  by  the  loss  of  self-control — by  the  dis- 
turbance and  excitement  which  this  produces,  often  in 
the  most  respectable  circles.  He  is  beyond  all  his  rivals 
the  novelist  of  "  scenes."  His  characters  get  drunk, 
or  go  mad  with  jealousy,  or  fall  in  epileptic  fits,  or  rave 
hysterically.  If  Dostoevsky  had  had  less  vision  he 
would  have  been  Strindberg.  If  his  vision  had  been 
sesthetic  and  sensual,  he  might  have  been  D'Annunzio. 

Like  them,  he  is  a  novelist  of  torture.  Turgenev  found 
in  his  work  something  Sadistic,  because  of  the  intensity 


10  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

with  which  he  dwells  on  cruelty  and  pain.  Certainly 
the  lust  of  cruelty — the  lust  of  destruction  for  destruction's 
sake — is  the  most  conspicuous  of  the  deadly  sins  in 
Dostoevsky's  men  and  women.  He  may  not  be  a  "  cruel 
author."  Mr.  J.  Middleton  Murry,  in  his  very  able 
"  critical  study,"  Dostoevsky,  denies  the  charge  indig- 
nantly. But  it  is  the  sensational  drama  of  a  cruel 
world  that  most  persistently  haunts  his  imagination. 

Love  itself  is  with  him,  as  with  Strindberg  and 
D'Annunzio,  for  the  most  part  only  a  sort  of  rearrange- 
ment of  hatred.  Or,  rather,  both  hatred  and  love  are 
volcanic  outbursts  of  the  same  passion.  He  does  also 
portray  an  almost  Christ -like  love,  a  love  that  is  outside 
the  body  and  has  the  nature  of  a  melting  and  exquisite 
charity.  He  sometimes  even  portrays  the  two  kinds 
of  love  in  the  same  person.  But  they  are  never  in 
balance  ;  they  are  always  in  demoniacal  conflict.  Their 
ups  and  downs  are  like  the  ups  and  downs  in  a  fight 
between  cat  and  dog.  Even  the  lust  is  never,  or  hardly 
ever,  the  lust  of  a  more  or  less  sane  man.  It  is  ahvays 
lust  with  a  knife. 

Dostoevsky  could  not  have  described  the  sin  of 
Nekhludov  in  Resurrection.  His  passions  are  such  as 
come  before  the  criminal  rather  than  the  civil  courts. 
His  people  are  possessed  with  devils  as  the  people  in 
all  but  religious  fiction  have  long  ceased  to  be.  "  This 
is  a  madhouse,"  cries  some  one  in  The  Idiot.  The 
cry  is,  I  fancy,  repeated  in  others  of  Dostoevsky's  novels. 
His  world  is  an   inferno. 

One  result  of  this  is  a  multiplicity  of  action.  There 
was  never  so  much  talk  in  any  other  novels,  and  there 
was  never  so  much  action.  Even  the  talk  is  of 
actions  more  than  of  ideas.  Dostoevsky's  characters 
describe  the  execution  of  a  criminal,  the  whipping  of 
an  ass,  the  torture  of  a  child.  He  sows  violent  deeds, 
not  with  the  hand,  but  with  the  sack.  Even  Prince 
Myshkin,  the  Christ-like  sufferer  in  The  Idiot,  narrates 
atrocities,     though    he     perpetrates    none.       Here,     for 


DOSTOEVSKY   THE  SENSATIONALIST       11 

example,  is  a  characteristic  Dostocvsky  story  put  in  the 
Prince's  moiitli  : 

In  the  evening  I  stopped  for  the  night  at  a  provincial  hotel,  and 
a  murder  had  been  committed  there  the  night  before.  .  .  .  Two 
peasants,  middle-aged  men,  friends  who  had  known  each  other 
for  a  long  time  and  were  not  drunk,  had  had  tea  and  were  meaning 
to  go  to  bed  in  the  same  room.  But  one  had  noticed  during  those 
last  two  days  that  the  other  was  wearing  a  silver  watch  on  a  yellow 
bead  chain,  which  he  seems  not  to  have  seen  on  him  before.  The 
man  was  not  a  thief  ;  he  was  an  honest  man,  in  fact,  and  by  a 
peasant's  standard  by  no  means  poor.  But  he  was  so  taken  with 
that  watch  and  so  fascinated  by  it  that  at  last  he  could  not  restrain 
himself.  He  took  a  knife,  and  when  his  friend  had  turned  away, 
he  approached  him  cautiously  from  behind,  took  aim,  turned  his 
eyes  heavenwards,  crossed  himself,  and  praying  fervently  "  God 
forgive  me,  for  Christ's  sake  !  "  he  cut  his  friend's  throat  at  one 
stroke  like  a  sheep  and  took  his  watch. 

One  would  not  accept  that  incident  from  any  Western 
author.  One  would  not  even  accept  it  from  Tolstoi 
or  Turgenev.  It  is  too  abnormal,  too  obviously  tainted 
with  madness.  Yet  to  Dostoevsky  such  aberrations  of 
conduct  make  a  continuous  and  overwhelming  appeal. 
The  crimes  in  his  books  seem  to  spring,  not  from  more 
or  less  rational  causes,  but  from  some  seed  of  lunacy. 

He  never  paints  Ever>'man  ;  he  always  projects 
Dostoevsky,  or  a  nightmare  of  Dostocvsky.  That  is 
why  Crime  and  Punishment  belongs  to  a  lower  range 
of  fiction  than  Anna  Karenina  or  Fathers  and  Sons. 
Raskolnikov's  crime  is  the  cold-blooded  crime  of  a 
diseased  mind.  It  interests  us  like  a  story  from 
Suetonius  or  like  Bluebeard.  But  there  is  no  com- 
municable passion  in  it  such  as  we  find  in  Agamemnon 
or  Othello.  We  sympathize,  indeed,  with  the  fears,  the 
bravado,  the  despair  that  succeed  the  crime.  But  when 
all  is  said,  the  central  figure  of  the  book  is  born  out 
of  fantasy.  He  is  a  grotesque  made  alive  by  sheer 
imaginative  intensity  and  passion.  He  is  as  distantly 
related  to  the  humanity  we  know  in  life  and  the 
humanity  we  know  in  literature  as  the   sober  peasant 


12  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

who  cut  his  friend's  throat,  saying,  "  God  forgive  me, 
for   Christ's   sake  !  " 

One  does  not  grudge  an  artist  an  abnormal  character 
or  two.  Dostoevsky,  however,  has  created  a  whole 
flock  of  these  abnormal  characters  and  watches  over 
them  as  a  hen  over  her  chickens.  He  invents  vicious 
grotesques  as  Dickens  invents  comic  grotesques.  In 
The  Brothers  Karamazov  he  reveals  the  malignance 
of  Smerdyakov  by  telling  us  that  he  was  one  who,  in 
his  childhood, 

was  very  fond  of  hanging  cats,  and  burying  them  with  great  cere- 
mony. He  used  to  dress  up  in  a  sheet  as  though  it  were  a  surpUce, 
and  sang,  and  waved  some  object  over  the  dead  cat  as  though 
it  were  a  censer. 

As  for  the  Karamazovs  themselves,  he  portrays  the  old 
father  and  the  eldest  of  his  sons  hating  each  other 
and  fighting  like  brutal  maniacs: 

Dmitri  threw  up  both  hands  and  suddenly  clutched  the  old  man 
by  the  two  tufts  of  hair  that  remained  on  his  temples,  tugged  at 
them,  and  flung  him  with  a  crash  on  the  floor.  He  kicked  him 
two  or  three  times  with  his  heel  in  the  face.  The  old  man  moaned 
shrilly.  Ivan,  though  not  so  strong  as  Dmitri,  threw  his  arms 
round  him,  and  with  all  his  might  pulled  him  away.  Alyosha 
helped  him  with  his  slender  strength,  holding  Dmitri  in  front. 

"  Madman  !     You've  killed  him  !  "  cried   Ivan. 

"  Serve  him  right !  "  shouted  Dmitri,  breathlessly.  "  If  I 
haven't  killed  him,  I'll  come  again  and  kill  him." 

It  is  easy  to  see  why  Dostoevsky  has  become  a 
popular  author.  Incident  follows  breathlessly  upon 
incident.  No  melodramatist  eyer  poured  out  incident 
upon  the  stage  from  such  a  horn  of  plenty.  His  people 
are  energetic  and  untamed,  like  cowboys  or  runaway 
horses.  They  might  be  described  as  runaway,  human 
beings. 

And  Dostoevsky  knows  how  to  crowd  his  stage  as 
only  the  inveterate  melodramatists  know.     Scenes  that 


DOSTOEVSKY   THE  SENSATIONALIST       13 

in  an  ordinary  novel  would  take  place  with  two  or 
three  figures  on  the  stage  are  represented  in  Dostoevsky 
as  taking  place  before  a  howling,  seething  mob.  "  A 
dozen  men  have  broken  in,"  a  maid  announces  in  one 
place  in  The  Idiot,  "  and  they  are  all  drunk."  "  Show 
them  all  in  at  once,"  she  is  bidden.  Dostoevsky  is 
always  ready  to  show  them  all  in  at  once. 

It  is  one  of  the  triumphs  of  his  genius  that,  however 
many  persons  he  introduces,  he  never  allows  them  to 
be  confused  into  a  hopeless  chaos.  His  story  finds 
its  way  unimpeded  through  the  mob.  On  two  opposite 
pages  of  The  Idiot  one  finds  the  following  characters 
brought  in  by  name  :  General  Epanchin,  Prince  S., 
Adelaida  Ivanovna,  Lizaveta  Prokofyevna,  Yevgeny 
Pavlovitch  Radomsky,  Princess  Byelokonsky,  Aglaia, 
Prince  Myshkin,  Kolya  Ivolgin,  Ippolit,  Varya,  Ferdy- 
shchenko,  Nastasya  Filippovna,  Nina  Alexandrovna, 
Ganya,  Ptitsyn,  and  General  Ivolgin.  And  yet  prac- 
tically all  of  them  remain  separate  and  created  beings. 
That  is  characteristic  at  once  of  Dostoevsky's  mastery 
and  his  monstrous  profusion. 

But  the  secret  of  Dostoevsky's  appeal  is  something 
more  than  the  multitude  and  thrill  of  his  incidents  and 
characters.  So  incongruous,  indeed,  is  the  sensational 
framework  of  his  stories  with  the  immense  and  sombre 
genius  that  broods  over  them  that  Mr.  Murry  is  inclined 
to  regard  the  incidents  as  a  sort  of  wild  spiritual 
algebra  rather  than  as  events  occurring  on  the  plane 
of  reality.  "  Dostoevsky,"  he  declares,  "  is  not  a 
novelist.      What  he  is  is  more  difficult  to  define." 

Mr.  Murry  boldly  faces  the  difticulty  and  attempts 
the  definition.  To  him  Dostoevsky's  work  is  "  the 
record  of  a  great  mind  seeking  for  a  way  of  life  ;  it  is 
more  than  a  record  of  struggle,  it  is  the  struggle  itself." 
Dostoevsky  himself  is  a  man  of  genius  "  lifted  out 
of  the  living  world,"  and  unable  to  descend  to  it  again. 
Mr.  Murry  confesses  that  at  times,  as  he  reads  him, 
he  is   "  seized  by  a  supersensual  terror." 


14  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

For  an  awful  moment  I  seem  to  see  things  with  the  eye  of 
eternity,  and  have  a  vision  of  suns  grown  cold,  and  hear  the  echo 
of  voices  calling  without  sound  across  the  waste  and  frozen  universe. 
And  those  voices  take  shape  in  certain  unforgettable  fragments 
of  dialogue  that  have  been  spoken  by  one  spirit  to  another  in  some 
ugly,  mean  tavern,  set  in  surrounding  darkness. 

Dostoevsky's  people,  it  is  suggested,  "  are  not  so  much 
men  and  women  as  disembodied  spirits  who  have  for 
the  moment  put  on  mortaUty." 

They  have  no  physical  being.  Ultimately  they  are  the  creations, 
not  of  a  man  who  desired  to  be,  but  of  a  spirit  which  sought  to 
know.  They  are  the  imaginations  of  a  God-tormented  mind. 
.  .  .  Because  they  are  possessed  they  are  no  longer  men  and  women. 

This  is  all  in  a  measure  true.  Dostoevsky  was  no 
realist.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  was  he  a  novelist 
of  horrors  for  horrors'  sake.  He  could  never  have 
written  Facts  in  the  Case  of  M.  Valdemar  like  Poe  for 
the   sake  of   the   aesthetic   thrill. 

None  the  less  he  remains  a  novelist  who  dramatized 
his  spiritual  experiences  through  the  medium  of  actions 
performed  by  human  beings.  Clearly  he  believed  that 
human  beings — though  not  ordinary  human  beings — were 
capable  of  performing  the  actions  he  narrates  with  such 
energy.  Mr.  Murry  will  have  it  that  the  actions  in  the 
novels  take  place  in  a  "  timeless  "  world,  largely  because 
Dostoevsky  has  the  habit  of  crowding  an  impossible 
rout  of  incidents  into  a  single  day.  But  surely  the 
Greeks  took  the  same  license  with  events.  This  habit 
of  packing  into  a  few  hours  actions  enough  to  fill  a 
lifetime  seems  to  me  in  Dostoevsky  to  be  a  novelist's 
device  rather  than  the  result  of  a  spiritual  escape  into 
timelessness. 

To   say  this   is   not   to   deny  the   spiritual   content   of 
Dostoevsky's  work — the  anguish   of  the  imprisoned  soul 
as    it    battles    with     doubt    and    denial    and     despair. 
There  is  in   Dostoevsky  a  suggestion  of  Caliban  trying" 
to  discover  some  better  god  than  Setebos.     At  the  same 


DOSTOEVSKY   THE  SENSATIONALIST       15 

time  one  would  be  going  a  great  deal  too  far  in  accepting 
the  description  of  himself  as  "a  child  of  unbelief." 
The  ultimate  attitude  of  Dostoevsky  is  as  Christian  as 
the  Apostle  Peter's,  "  Lord,  I  beheve  ;  help  Thou  mine 
unbelief  !  "  When  Dostoevsky  writes,  "  If  any  one  could 
prove  to  me  that  Christ  is  outside  the  truth,  and  if  the 
truth  really  did  exclude  Christ,  I  shall  prefer  to  stay 
with  Christ  and  not  with  the  truth,"  Mr.  Murry  inter- 
prets this  as  a  denial  of  Christ.  It  is  surely  a  kind  of 
faith,  though  a  despairing  kind.  And  beyond  the  dark 
night  of  suffering,  and  dissipating  the  night,  Dostoevsky 
still  sees  the  light  of  Christian  compassion.  His  work 
is  all  earthquake  and  eclipse  and  dead  stars  apart  from 
this.  [ 

He  does  not,  Mr.  Murry  urges,  believe,  ^as  'has  often 
been  said,  that  men  are  purified  by  suffering.  It  seems 
to  me  that  Dostoevsky  believes  that  men  are  purified, 
if  not  by  their  own  sufferings,  at  least  by  the  sufferings 
of  others.  Or  even  by  the  compassion  of  others,  like 
Prince  Myshkin  in  The  Idiot.  But  the  truth  is,  it  is 
by  no  means  easy  to  systematize  the  creed  of  a  creature 
at  war  with  life,  as  Dostoevsky  was — a  man  tortured 
by  the  eternal  conflict  of  the  devilish  and  the  divine  in 
his  own  breast. 

His  work,  like  his  face,  bears  the  mark  of  this  terrible 
conflict.  The  novels  are  the  perfect  image  of  the  man. 
As  to  the  man  himself,  the  Vicomte  de  Vogiie  described 
him  as  he  saw  him  in  the  last  years  of  his  life:  — 

Short,  lean,  neurotic,  worn  and  bowed  down  with  sixty  years 
of  misfortune,  faded  rather  than  aged,  with  a  look  of  an  invaUd 
of  uncertain  age,  with  a  long  beard  and  hair  still  fair,  and  for  all 
that  still  breathing  forth  the  "  cat-life."  .  .  .  The  face  was  that 
of  a  Russian  peasant ;  a  real  Moscow  mujik,  with  a  f3at  nose,  small, 
sharp  eyes  deeply  set,  sometimes  dark  and  gloomy,  sometimes 
gentle  and  mild.  The  forehead  was  large  and  lumpy,  the  temples 
were  hollow  as  if  hammered  in.  His  drawn,  twitching  features 
seemed  to  press  down  on  his  sad-looking  mouth.  .  .  .  Eyelids, 
lips,  and  every  muscle  of  his  face  twitched  nervously  the  whole 
time.     When  he  became  excited  on  a  certain  point,  one  could  have 


16  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

sworn  that  one  had  seen  him  before  seated  on  a  bench  in  a  police- 
court  awaiting  trial,  or  among  vagabonds  who  passed  their  time 
begging  before  the  prison  doors.  At  all  other  times  he  carried 
that  look  of  sad  and  gentle  meekness  seen  on  the  images  of  old 
Slavonic  saints. 

That  is  the  portrait  of  the  man  one  sees  behind  Dos- 
toevsky's  novels — a  portrait  one  might  ahnost  have  in- 
ferred from  the  novels.  It  is  a  figure  that  at  once 
fascinates  and  repels.  It  is  a  figure  that  leads  one  to 
the  edge  of  the  abyss.  One  cannot  live  at  all  times 
with  such  an  author.  But  his  books  will  endure  as 
the  confession  of  the  most  terrible  spiritual  and  imagina- 
tive experiences  that  modern  literature  has  given  us. 


II 

JANE   AUSTEN:    NATURAL    HISTORIAN 

Jane  Austen  has  often  been  praised  as  a  natural 
historian.  She  is  a  naturalist  among  tame  animals.  She 
does  not  study  man  (as  Dostoevsky  does)  in  his  wild 
state  before  he  has  been  domesticated.  Her  men  and 
women  are  essentially  men  and  women  of  the  fireside. 

Nor  is  Jane  Austen  entirely  a  realist  in  her  treatment 
even  of  these.  She  idealizes  them  to  the  point  of  making 
most  of  them  good-looking,  and  she  hates  poverty  to 
such  a  degree  that  she  seldom  can  endure  to  write  about 
anybody  who  is  poor.  She  is  not  happy  in  the  company 
of  a  character  who  has  not  at  least  a  thousand  pounds. 
"  People  get  so  horridly  poor  and  economical  in  this 
part  of  the  world,"  she  writes  on  one  occasion,  "  that 
I  have  no  patience  with  them.  Kent  is  the  only  place 
for  happiness  ;  everybody  is  rich  there."  Her  novels 
do  not  introduce  us  to  the  most  exalted  levels  of  the 
aristocracy.  They  provide  us,  however,  with  a  natural 
history  of  county  people  and  of  people  who  are  just 
below  the  level  of  county  people  and  live  in  the  eager 
hope  of  being  taken  notice  of  by  them.  There  is  more  /• 
caste  snobbishness,  I  think,  in  Jane  Austen's  novels  than 
in  any  other  fiction  of  equal  genius.  She,  far  more  than 
Thackeray,   is   the  novelist  of   snobs. 

How  far  Jane  Austen  herself  shared  the  social  pre- 
judices of  her  characters  it  is  not  easy  to  say.  Un- 
questionably, she  satirized  them.  At  the  same  time, 
she  imputes  the  sense  of  superior  rank  not  ^only  to 
her  butts,  but  to  her  heroes  and  heroines,  as  no  other 
novelist   has   ever    done.      Emma    Woodhouse   lamented 

2  17 


18  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

the  deficiency  of  this  sense  in  Frank  Churcliill.  "  His 
indifference  to  a  confusion  of  rank,"  she  thought, 
"  bordered  too  much  on  inelegance  of  mind."  Mr. 
Darcy,  again,  even  when  he  melts  so  far  as  to  become 
an  avowed  lover,  neither  forgets  his  social  position,  nor 
omits  to  talk  about  it.  "His  sense  of  her  inferiority, 
of  its  being  a  degradation  .  .  .  was  dwelt  on  with  a 
warmth  which  seemed  due  to  the  consequence  he  was 
wounding,  but  was  very  unlikely  to  recommend  his  suit." 
On  discovering,  to  his  amazement,  that  Elizabeth  is 
offended  rather  than  overwhelmed  by  his  condescension, 
he  defends  himself  warmly.  "  Disguise  of  every  sort," 
he  declares,  "  is  my  abhorrence.  Nor  am  I  ashamed 
of  the  feelings  I  related.  They  were  natural  and  just. 
Could  you  expect  me  to  rejoice  in  the  inferiority  of 
your  connections?  To  congratulate  myself  on  the  hope 
of  relations  whose  condition  in  hfe  is  so  decidedly  beneath 
my  own? " 

It  is  perfectly  true  that  Darcy  and  Emma  Woodhouse 
are  the  butts  of  Miss  Austen  as  well  as  being  among 
her  heroes  and  heroines.  She  mocks  them— Darcy 
especially— no  less  than  she  admires.  She  loves  to  let 
her  wit  play  about  the  egoism  of  social  caste.  She 
is  quite  merciless  in  deriding  it  when  it  becomes  over- 
bearing, as  in  Lady  Catherine  de  Bourgh,  or  when  it 
produces  flunkeyish  reactions,  as  in  Mr.  Collins.  But 
I  fancy  she  liked  a  modest  measure  of  it.  Most  people 
do.  Jane  Austen,  in  writing  so  much  about  the  sense 
of  family  and  position,  chose  as  her  theme  one  of  the 
most   widespread  passions   of   civilized  human   nature. 

She  was  herself  a  clergyman's  daughter.  She  was 
the  seventh  of  a  family  of  eight,  bom  in  the  parsonage 
at  Steventon,  in  Hampshire.  Her  life  seems  to  have 
been  far  from  exciting.  Her  father,  like  the  clergy  in 
her  novels,  was  a  man  of  leisure — of  so  much  leisure, 
as  Mr.  Cornish  reminds  us,  that  he  was  able  to  read 
out  Cowper  to  his  family  in  the  mornings.  Jane  was 
brought  up  to  be  a  young  lady  of  leisure.     She  learned 


JANE  AUSTEN :   NATURAL  HISTORIAN         19 


French  and  Italian  and  sewing  :  she  was  "  especially 
great  in  satin-stitch."  She  excelled  at  the  game  of 
spillikins. 

She  must  have  begun  to  write  at  an  early  age.  In 
later  life,  she  urges  an  ambitious  niece,  aged  twelve, 
to  give  up  writing  till  she  is  sixteen,  adding  that  "  she  had 
herself  often  wished  she  had  read  more  and  written  less 
in  the  corresponding  years  of  her  hfe."  She  was  only 
twenty  when  she  began  to  write  First  Impressions,  the 
perfect  book  which  was  not  published  till  seventeen  years 
later  with  the  title  altered  to  Pride  and  Prejudice.  She 
wrote  secretly  for  many  years.  Her  family  knew  of  it, 
but  the  world  did  not— not  even  the  servants  or  the 
visitors  to  the  house.  She  used  to  hide  the  little  sheets 
of  paper  on  which  she  was  writing  when  any  one 
approached.  She  had  not,  apparently,  a  room  to  herself, 
and  must  have  written  under  constant  threat  of 
interruption.  She  objected  to  having  a  creaking  door 
mended  on  one  occasion,  because  she  knew  by  it  when 
any  one  was  coming.  i 

She  got  little  encouragement  to  write.  Pride  and 
Prejudice  was  offered  to  a  publisher  in  1797  :  he  would 
not  even  read  it.  Northanger  Abbey  was  written  in  the 
next  two  years.  It  was  not  accepted  by  a  publisher, 
however,  till  1803  ;  and  he,  having  paid  ten  pounds 
for  it,  refused  to  publish  it.  One  of  Miss  Austen's 
brothers  bought  back  the  manuscript  at  the  price  at 
which  it  had  been  sold  twelve  or  thirteen  years  later  ; 
but  even  then  it  was  not  published  till  1818,  when 
the   author  was   dead. 

The  first  of  her  books  to  appear  was  Sense  and 
Sensibility.  She  had  begun  to  write  it  immediately  after 
finishing  Pride  and  Prejudice.  It  was  published  in  181  i, 
a  good  many  years  later,  when  Miss  Austen  was  thirty- 
six  years  old.  The  title-page  merely  said  that  it  was 
written  "  By  a  Lady."  The  author  never  put  her  name 
to  any  of  her  books.  For  an  anonymous  first  novel, 
it  must  be  admitted.  Sense  and  Sensibility  was  not  un- 


20  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

successful.  It  brought  Miss  Austen  £i  50 — "  a  prodigious 
recompense,"  she  thought,  "  for  that  which  had  cost 
her  nothing."  The  fact,  however,  that  she  had  not 
earned  more  than  £700  from  her  novels  by  the  time  of 
her  death  shows  that  she  never  became  a  really  popular 
author  in  her  lifetime. 

She  was  rewarded  as  poorly  in  credit  as  in  cash, 
though  the  Prince  Regent  became  an  enthusiastic  admirer 
of  her  books,  and  kept  a  set  of  them  in  each  of  his 
residences.  It  was  the  Prince  Regent's  librarian,  the 
Rev.  J.  S.  Clarke,  who,  on  becoming  chaplain  to  Prince 
Leopold  of  Saxe-Coburg,  made  the  suggestion  to  her 
that  "  an  historical  romance,  illustrative  of  the  history 
of  the  august  House  of  Coburg,  would  just  now  be 
very  interesting."  Mr.  Collins,  had  he  been  able  to 
wean  himself  from  Fordyce's  Sermons  so  far  as  to  allow 
himself  to  take  an  interest  in  fiction,  could  hardly  have 
made  a  proposal  more  exquisitely  grotesque.  One  is 
glad  the  proposal  was  made,  however,  not  only  for  its 
own  sake,  but  because  it  drew  an  admirable  reply  from 
Miss  Austen  on  the  nature  of  her  genius.  *'  I  could  not 
sit  seriously  down,"  she  declared,  "  to  write  a  serious 
romance  under  any  other  motive  than  to  save  my  life  ; 
and,  if  it  were  indispensable  for  me  to  keep  it  up, 
and  never  relax  into  laughing  at  myself  or  at  other 
people,  I  am  sure  I  should  be  hung  before  I  had  finished 
the   first  chapter." 

Jane  Austen  knew  herself  for  what  she  was,  an 
inveterate  laugher.  She  belonged  essentially  to  the 
eighteenth  century — the  century  of  the  wits.  She  enjoyed 
the  spectacle  of  men  and  women  making  fools  of  them- 
selves, and  she  did  not  hide  her  enjoyment  under  a 
pretence  of  unobservant  good-nature.  She  observed  with 
malice.  It  is  tolerably  certain  that  Miss  Mitford  was 
wrong  in  accepting  the  description  of  her  in  private 
life  as  "  perpendicular,  precise,  taciturn,  a  poker  of  whom 
every  one  is  afraid."  Miss  Austen,  one  is  sure,  was 
a  lady  of  good-humour,  as  well  as  a  novelist  of  good- 


JANE  AUSTEN:  NATURAL  HISTORIAN         21 

humour  ;  but  the  good-humour  had  a  flavour.  It  was 
the  good-humour  of  the  satirist,  not  of  the  sentimentaHzer. 
One  can  imagine  Jane  Austen  herself  speaking  as 
EHzabeth  Bennet  once  spoke  to  her  monotonously  soft- 
worded  sister,  "  That  is  the  most  unforgiving  speech," 
she  said,   "  that  I  ever  heard  you  utter.     Good  girl  !  " 

Miss  Austen  has  even  been  accused  of  irreverence, 
and  we  occasionally  find  her  in  her  letters  as  irreverent 
in  the  presence  of  death  as  Mr.  Shaw.  *'  Only  think," 
she  writes  in  one  letter — a  remark  she  works  into  a  chapter 
of  Emma,  by  the  way — "  of  Mrs.  Holder  being  dead  1 
Poor  woman,  she  has  done  the  only  thing  in  the  world 
she  could  possibly  do  to  make  one  cease  to  abuse  her." 
And  on  another  occasion  she  writes  :  "  Mrs.  Hall,  of 
Sherborne,  was  brought  to  bed  yesterday  of  a  dead  child, 
some  weeks  before  she  expected,  owing'  to  a  fright.  I 
suppose  she  happened  unawares  to  look  at  her  husband." 
It  is  possible  that  Miss  Austen's  sense  of  the  comic  ran 
away  with  her  at  times  as  Emma  Woodhouse's  did. 
I  do  not  know  of  any  similar  instance  of  cruelty  in  con- 
versation on  the  part  of  a  likeable  person  so  unpardon- 
able as  Emma  Woodhouse's  witticism  at  the  expense  of 
Miss  Bates  at  the  Box  Hill  picnic.  Miss  Austen  makes 
Emma  ashamed  of  her  witticism,  however,  after  Mr. 
Knightley  has  lectured  her  for  it.  She  sets  a  limit 
to  the  rights  of  wit,  again,  in  Pride  and  Prejudice, 
when  Elizabeth  defends  her  sharp  tongue  against  Darcy. 
"  The  wisest  and  best  of  men,"  ...  he  protests,  "  may 
be  rendered  ridiculous  by  a  person  whose  first  object 
in  life  is  a  joke."  "  I  hope  I  never  ridicule  what  is 
wise  or  good,"  says  Elizabeth  in  the  course  of  her 
answer.  "  Follies  and  nonsense,  whims  and  incon- 
sistencies, do  divert  me,  I  own,  and  I  laugh  at  them 
whenever  I  can."  The  six  novels  that  Jane  Austen  has 
left  us  might  be  described  as  the  record  of  the  diversions 
of   a  clergyman's   daughter. 

The  diversions  of  Jane  Austen  were,  beyond  those  of 
most  novelists,  the  diversions  of  a  spectator.      (That  is 


22  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

what  Scott  and  Macaulay  meant  by  comparing  her  to 
Shakespeare.)  Or,  rather,  they  were  the  diversions  of 
a  listener.  She  observed  with  her  ears  rather  than  with 
her  eyes.  With  her,  conversation  was  three-fourths  of 
hfe.  Her  stories  are  stories  of  people  who  reveal  them- 
selves almost  exclusively  in  talk.  She  wastes  no  time 
in  telling  us  what  people  and  places  looked  like.  She 
will  dismiss  a  man  or  a  house  or  a  view  or  a  dinner 
with  an  adjective  such  as  "  handsome."  There  is  more 
description  of  persons  and  places  in  Mr.  Shaw's  stage- 
directions  than  in  all  Miss  Austen's  novels.  She  cuts  the 
'osses  and  comes  to  the  cackle  as  no  other  Enghsh 
novelist  of  the  same  eminence  has  ever  done.  If  we 
know  anything  of  the  setting  or  character  or  even  the 
appearance  of  her  men  and  women^  it  is  due  far  more 
to  what  they  say  than  to  anything  that  is  said  about 
them.  And  yet  how  perfect  is  her  gallery  of  portraits  ! 
One  can  guess  the  very  angle  of  Mr.   Collins's  toes. 

One  seems,  too,  to  be  able  to  follow  her  characters 
through  the  trivial  round  of  the  day's  idleness  as  closely 
as  if  one  were  pursuing  them  under  the  guidance  of  a 
modern  reahst.  They  are  the  most  unoccupied  people, 
I  think,  who  ever  lived  in  literature.  They  are  people 
in  whose  lives  a  shght  fall  of  snow  is  an  event.  Louisa 
Musgrave's  jump  on  the  Cobb  at  Lyme  Regis  produces 
more  commotion  in  the  Jane  Austen  world  than  murder 
and  arson  do  in  an  ordinary  novel.  Her  people  do  not 
even  seem,  for  the  most  part,  to  be  interested  in  any- 
thing but  their  opinions  of  each  other.  They  have 
few  passions  beyond  match-making.  They  are  uncon- 
cerned about  any  of  the  great  events  of  their  time. 
Almost  the  only  reference  in  the  novels  to  the  Napoleonic 
iWars  is  a  mention  of  the  prize-money  of  naval  officers. 
"  Many  a  noble  fortune,"  says  Mr.  Shepherd  in 
Persuasion,  "  has  been  made  during  the  war."  Miss 
Austen's  principal  use  of  the  Navy  outside  Mansfield 
Park  is  as  a  means  of  portraying  the  exquisite  vanity 
of    Sir    Walter    Elliott — his    inimitable    manner    of    em- 


JANE  AUSTEN :   NATURAL   HISTORIAN         23 


phasizing  the  importance  of  both  rank  and  good  looks  in 
the  make-up  of  a  gentleman.  "  The  profession  has  its 
utiHty,"  he  says  of  the  Navy,  "  but  I  should  be  sorry  to 
see  any  friend  of  mine  belonging  to  it."  He  goes  on 
to   explain   his   reasons: 

It  is  in  two  points  offensive  to  me  ;  I  have  two  strong  grounds 
of  objection  to  it.  First  as  being  the  means  of  bringing  persons 
of  obscure  birth  into  undue  distinction,  and  raising  men  to  honours 
which  their  fathers  and  grandfathers  never  dreamt  of  ;  and,  secondly, 
as  it  cuts  up  a  man's  youth  and  vigour  most  terribly  ;  a  sailor 
grows  older  sooner  than  any  other  man. 

Sir  Walter  complains  that  he  had  once  had  to  give  place 
at  dinner  to  Lord  St.  Ives,  the  son  of  a  curate,  and  "  a 
certain  Admiral  Baldwin,  the  most  deplorable-looking 
personage  you  can  imagine  :  his  face  the  colour  of 
mahogany,  rough  and  rugged  to  the  last  degree,  all  lines 
and  wrinkles,  nine  grey  hairs  of  a  side,  and  nothing  but 
a  dab  of  powder  at  top  " : 

"  In  the  name  of  heaven,  who  is  that  old  fellow  ?  "  said  I  to  a 
friend  of  mine  who  was  standing  near  (Sir  Basil  Morley).  "  Old 
fellow  !  "  cried  Sir  Basil,  "  it  is  Admiral  Baldwin.  What  do  you 
take  his  age  to  be  ?  "  "  Sixty,"  said  I,  "  or  perhaps  sixty-two." 
"Forty,"  rephed  Sir  Basil,  "forty,  and  no  more."  Picture  to  your- 
selves my  amazement ;  I  shall  not  easily  forget  Admiral  Baldwin. 
I  never  saw  quite  so  wretched  an  example  of  what  a  sea-faring 
life  can  do  ;  but  to  a  degree,  I  know,  it  is  the  same  with  them  all  ; 
they  are  all  knocked  about,  and  exposed  to  every  climate  and 
every  weather,  till  they  are  not,  fit  to  be  seen.  It  is  a  pity  they 
are  not  knocked  on  the  head  at  once,  before  they  reach  Admiral 
Baldwin's  age. 

That,  I  think,  is  an  excellent  example  of  Miss  Austen's 
genius  for  making  her  characters  talk.  .uckily,  con- 
versation was  still  formal  in  her  day,  and  it  was  as 
possible  for  her  as  for  Congreve  to  make  middling  men 
and  women  talk  first-rate  prose.  She  did  more  than 
this,  however.  She  was  the  first  English  novelist  before 
Meredith  to  portray  charming  women  with  free  person- 
alities.    Ehzabeth  Bennet  and  Emma  Woodhouse  have 


24  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

an  independence  (rare  in  English  fiction)  of  the  accident 
of  being  fallen  in  love  with.  Elizabeth  is  a  delightful 
prose  counterpart  of  Beatrice. 

Miss  Austen  has  another  point  of  resemblance  to 
Meredith  besides  that  which  I  have  mentioned.  She 
loves  to  portray  men  puffed  up  with  self -approval.  She, 
too,  is  a  satirist  of  the  male  egoist.  Her  books  are 
the  most  finished  social  satires  in  English  fiction.  They 
are  so  perfect  in  the  delicacy  of  their  raillery  as  to  be 
charming.  One  is  conscious  in  them,  indeed,  of  the 
presence  of  a  sparkling  spirit.  Miss  Austen  comes  as 
near  being  a  star  as  it  is  possible  to  come  in  eighteenth- 
century  conversational  prose.  She  used  to  say  that, 
if  ever  she  should  marry,  she  would  fancy  being  Mrs. 
Crabbe.  She  had  much  of  Crabbe's  realism,  indeed  ; 
but  what  a  dance  she  led  reahsm  with  the  mocking  light 
of  her  wit  ! 


Ill 

MR.    G.    K.    CHESTERTON    AND 
MR.    HILAIRE    BELLOC 

1.  The  Heavenly  Twins 

It  was  Mr.  Shaw  who,  in  the  course  of  a  memorable 
controversy,  invented  a  fantastic  pantomime  animal, 
which  he  called  the  "  Chester-Belloc."  Some  such 
invention  was  necessary  as  a  symbol  of  the  literary 
comradeship  of  Mr.  Hilaire  Belloc  and  Mr.  Gilbert 
Chesterton.  For  Mr.  Belloc  and  Mr.  Chesterton,  what- 
ever may  be  the  dissimilarities  in  the  form  and  spirit 
of  their  work,  cannot  be  thought  of  apart  from  each 
other.  They  are  as  inseparable  as  the  red  and  green 
lights  of  a  ship :  the  one  illumines  this  side  and  the 
other  that,  but  they  are  both  equally  concerned  with 
announcing  the  path  of  the  good  ship  "  Mediasvalism  " 
through  the  dangerous  currents  of  our  times.  Fifty 
years  ago,  when  philology  was  one  of  the  imaginative 
arts,  it  would  have  been  easy  enough  to  gain  credit  for 
the  theory  that  they  are  veritable  reincarnations  of  the 
Heavenly  Twins  going  about  the  earth  with  corrupted 
names.  Chesterton  is  merely  English  for  Castor,  and 
Belloc  is  Pollux  transmuted  into  French.  Certainly,  if 
the  philologist  had  also  been  an  evangelical  Protestant, 
he  would  have  felt  a  double  confidence  in  identifying 
the  two  authors  with  Castor  and  Pollux  as  the 

Great  Twin  Brethren, 

Who  fought  so  well  for  Rome. 

A    critic    was    struck    some    years    ago    by    the    pro- 
priety of  the  fact  that  Mr.   Chesterton  and  Mr.  Belloc 

25 


26  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

brought  out  books  of  the  same  kind  and  the  same  size, 
through  the  same  pubHsher,  almost  in  the  same  week. 
Mr.  Be  Hoc,  to  be  sure,  called  his  volume  of  essays  This, 
Thai,  and  the  Other,  and  Mr.  Chesterton  called  his  A 
Miscellany  of  Men.  But  if  Mr.  Chesterton  had  called 
his  book  This,  That,  and  the  Other  and  Mr.  Belloc 
had  called  his  A  Miscellany  of  Men,  it  would  not  have 
made  a  pennyworth  of  difference.  Each  book  is  simply 
a  ragbag  of  essays — the  riotous  and  fantastically  joyous 
essays  of  Mr.  Chesterton,  the  sardonic  and  arrogantly 
gay  essays  of  Mr.  Belloc.  Each,  however,  has  a  unity 
of  outlook,  not  only  an  internal  unity,  but  a  unity  with 
the  other.  Each  has  the  outlook  of  the  mediccv^alist 
spirit — the  spirit  which  finds  crusades  and  miracles  more 
natural  than  peace  meetings  and  the  discoveries  of 
science,  which  gives  Heaven  and  Hell  a  place  on  the 
map  of  the  world,  which  casts  a  sinister  eye  on  Turks 
and  Jews,  which  brings  its  gaiety  to  the  altar  as  the 
tumbler  in  the  story  brought  his  cap  and  bells,  which 
praises  dogma  and  wine  and  the  rule  of  the  male, 
which  abominates  the  scientific  spirit,  and  curses  the 
day  on  which  Bacon  was  bom.  Probably,  neither  of 
the  authors  would  object  to  being  labelled  a  mediasvalist, 
except  in  so  far  as  we  all  object  to  having  labels  affixed 
to  us  by  other  people.  Mr.  Chesterton's  attitude  on 
the  matter,  indeed,  is  clear  from  that  sentence  in  What's 
Wrong  with  the  World,  in  which  he  affirms:  "  Mankind 
has  not  passed  through  the  Middle  Ages.  Rather  man- 
kind has  retreated  from  the  Middle  Ages  in  reaction  and 
rout."  And  if,  on  learning  some  of  the  inferences  he 
makes  from  this,  you  protest  that  he  is  reactionary,  and 
is  trying  to  put  back  the  hands  of  the  clock,  he  is  quite 
unashamed,  and  replies  that  the  moderns  "  are  always 
saying  '  you  can't  put  the  clock  back.'  The  simple 
and  obvious  answer  is,  *  You  can.*  A  clock,  being  a 
piece  of  human  construction,  can  be  restored  by  the 
human  finger  to  any  figure  or  hour."  The  effrontery 
of  an  answer  like  that  is  so  magnificent  that  it  takes 


MR.  G.  K.   CHESTERTON  AND  MR.   BELLOC    27 

one's  breath  away.  The  chief  difficulty  of  Mr.  Chesterton 
and  Mr.  Belloc,  however,  seems  to  be  that  they  want 
their  clock  to  point  to  two  different  hours  at  the  same 
time,  neither  of  which  happens  to  be  the  hour  which 
the  sun  has  just  marked  at  Greenwich.  They  want 
it  to  point  at  once  to  878  and  1789 — to  Ethandune 
and  the  French  Revolution. 

Similar  though  they  are  in  the  revolutio-mediasvalist 
background  of  their  philosophy,  however,  Mr.  Chesterton 
and  Mr.  Belloc  are  as  unlike  as  possible  in  the  spirit 
in  which  they  proclaim  it.  If  Mr.  Chesterton  gets  up 
on  his  box  to  prophesy  against  the  times,  he  seems  to 
do  so  out  of  a  passionate  and  unreasoning  affection  for 
his  fellows.  If  Mr.  Belloc  denounces  the  age,  he  seems 
also  to  be  denouncing  the  human  race.  Mr.  Chesterton 
is  jovial  and  democratic!-;  Mr.  Belloc  is  (to  some  extent) 
saturnine  and  autocratic.  Mr.  Chesterton  belongs  to 
the  exuberantly  lovable  tradition  of  Dickens  ;  indeed, 
he  is,  in  the  opinion  of  many  people,  the  most 
exuberantly  lovable  personality  which  has  expressed  itself 
in  English  literature  since  Dickens.  Mr.  Belloc,  on 
the  other  hand,  has  something  of  the  gleaming  and 
solitary  fierceness  of  Swift  and  Hazlitt.  Mr.  Chesterton's 
vision,  coloured  though  it  is  with  the  colours  of  the 
past,  projects  itself  generously  into  the  future.  He  is 
foreteUing  the  eve  of  the  Utopia  of  the  poor  and  the 
oppressed  when  he  speaks  of 

the  riot  that  all  good  men,  even  the  most  conservative,  really 
dream  of,  when  the  sneer  shall  be  struck  from  the  face  of  the  well- 
fed  ;  when  the  wine  of  honour  shall  be  poured  down  the  throat 
of  despair  ;  when  we  shall,  so  far  as  to  the  sons  of  flesh  is  possible, 
take  tyranny,  and  usury,  and  public  treason,  and  bind  them  into 
bundles,  and  burn  them. 

There  is  anger,  as  well  as  affection,  in  this  eloquence 
— anger  as  of  a  new  sort  of  knight  thirsting  to  spill 
the  blood  of  a  new  sort  of  barbarian  in  the  name  of 
Christ.      Mr.   Belloc's   attack   on   the   barbarians   lacks 


28  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

the  charity  of  these  fiery  sentences.  He  concludes  his 
essay  on  the  scientific  spirit,  as  embodied  in  Lombroso, 
for  instance,  with  tlie  words,  "  The  Ass  !  "  And  he 
seems  to  sneer  the  insult  where  Mr.  Chesterton  would 
have  roared  it.  Mr.  Chesterton  and  he  may  be  at  one  in 
the  way  in  which  they  regard  the  scientific  criminologists, 
eugenists,  coUectivists,  pragmatists,  post-impressionists, 
and  most  of  the  other  "  ists  "  of  recent  times,  as  an 
army  of  barbarians  invading  the  territories  of  mediaeval 
Christendom.  But  while  Mr.  Chesterton  is  in  the  gap 
of  danger,  waving  against  his  enemies  the  sword  of 
the  spirit,  Mr.  Belloc  stands  on  a  little  height  apart, 
aiming  at  them  the  more  cruel  shafts  of  the  intellect. 
It  is  not  that  he  is  less  courageous  than  Mr,  Chesterton, 
but  that  he  is  more  contemptuous.  Here,  for  example, 
is  how  he  meets  the  barbarian  attack,  especially  as  it 
is  delivered  by  M.  Bergson  and  his  school:  — 

In  its  most  grotesque  form,  it  challenges  the  accuracy  of  mathe- 
matics ;  in  its  most  vicious,  the  processes  of  the  human  reason. 
The  Barbarian  is  as  proud  as  a  savage  in  a  top  hat  when  he  talks 
of  the  elliptical  or  the  hyperbolic  universe,  and  tries  to  picture 
parallel  straight  lines  converging  or  diverging — but  never  doing 
anything  so  vulgarly  old-fashioned  as  to  remain   parallel. 

The  Barbarian,  when  he  has  graduated  to  be  a  "  pragmatist," 
struts  like  a  nigger  in  evening  clothes,  and  believes  himself  superior 
to  the  gift  of  reason,  etc.,  etc. 

It  would  be  unfair  to  offer  this  passage  as  an  example 
of  Mr.  Bello'c's  dominating  genius,  but  it  is  an  excellent 
example  of  his  domineering  temper.  His  genius  and 
his  temper,  one  may  add,  seem',  in  these  essays,  to,  be 
always  trying  to  climb  on  one  another's  shoulders,  and 
it  is  when  his  genius  gets  uppermost  that  he  becomes  one 
of  the  most  biting  and  exhilarating  writers  of  his  time. 
On  such  occasions  his  malice  ceases  to  be  a  talent, 
and  rises  into  an  enthusiasm,  as  in  The  Servants  of  the 
Rich,  where,  like  a  mediaeval  (bard,  he  shows  no  hesitation 
in  housing  his  enemies  in  the  circles  of  Hell.  His 
gloating  proclamation  of  the  eternal  doom  of  the  rich 


MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AND   MR.   BELLOC    29 


men's    servants    is    an    infectious    piece    of    humour,    at 
once  grim  and  irresponsible :  — 

Their  doom  is  an  eternal  sleeplessness  and  a  nakedness  in  the 
gloom.  .  .  .  These  are  those  men  who  were  wont  to  come  into 
the  room  of  the  Poor  Guest  at  early  morning,  with  a  steadfast 
and  assured  step,  and  a  look  of  insult.  These  are  those  who  would 
take  the  tattered  garments  and  hold  them  at  arm's  length,  as  much 
as  to  say  :  "  What  rags  these  scribblers  wear  !  "  and  then,  casting 
them  over  the  arm,  with  a  gesture  that  meant :  "  Well,  they  must 
be  brushed,  but  Heaven  knows  if  they  will  stand  it  without  coming 
to  pieces  !  "  would  next  discover  in  the  pockets  a  great  quantity 
of  middle-class  things,   and   notably  loose  tobacco.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  Then  one  would  see  him  turn  one's  socks  inside  out,  which 
is  a  ritual  with  the  horrid  tribe.  Then  a  great  bath  would  be 
trundled  in,  and  he  would  set  beside  it  a  great  can,  and  silently 
pronounce  the  judgment  that,  whatever  else  was  forgiven  the 
middle-class,  one  thing  would  not  be  forgiven  them — the  neglect 
of  the  bath,  of  the  splashing  about  of  the  water,  and  of  the  adequate 
wetting  of  the  towel. 

AH  these  things  we  have  suffered,  you  and  I,  at  their  hands. 
But  be  comforted.     They  writhe  in  Hell  with  their  fellows. 

Mr,  Belloc  is  not  one  of  those  authors  who  can  be 
seen  at  their  best  in  quotations,  but  even  the  mutilated 
fragment  just  given  suggests  to  some  extent  the  mixture 
of  gaiety  and  malice  that  distinguishes  his  v^ork  from 
the  work  of  any  of  his  contemporaries.  His  gifts  run 
to  satire,  as  Mr.  Chesterton's  run  to  imaginative  argu- 
ment. It  is  this,  perhaps,  which  accounts  for  the  fact 
that,  of  these  two  authors,  who  write  with  their  heads 
in  the  Middle  Ages,  it  is  Mr.  Chesterton  who  is  the 
more  comprehensive  critic  of  his  own  times.  He  never 
fights  private,  but  always  pubMc,  battles  in  his  essays. 
His  mediaevalism  seldom  degenerates  into  a  prejudice, 
as  it  often  does  with  Mr.  Belloc.  It  represents  a  genuine 
theory  of  the  human  soul,  and  of  human  freedom.  He 
laments  as  he  sees  men  exchanging  the  authority  of 
a  spiritual  institution,  like  the  Church,  for  the  authority 
of  a  carnal  institution,  like  a  bureaucracy.  He  rages 
as   he   sees   them   abandoning    charters    that   gave   men 


30  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

rights,  and  accepting  charters  that  only  give  them  pro- 
hibitions. It  has  been  the  custom  for  a  long  time  to 
speak  of  Mr.  Chesterton  as  an  optimist  ;  and  there  was, 
indeed,  a  time  when  he  was  so  rejoiced  by  the  discovery 
that  the  children  of  men  were  also  the  children  of 
God,  that  he  was  as  aggressively  cheerful  as  Whitman 
and  Browning  rolled  into  one.  But  he  has  left  all  that 
behind  him.  The  insistent  vision  of  a  world  in  full 
retreat  from  the  world  of  Alfred  and  Charlemagne  and 
the  saints  and  the  fight  for  Jerusalem — from  this  and 
the  allied  world  of  Danton  and  Robespierre,  and  the 
rush  to  the  Bastille — has  driven  him  back  upon  a  partly 
well-founded  and  partly  ill-founded  Christian  pessimism. 
To  him  it  now  seems  as  if  Jerusalem  had  captured 
the  Christians  rather  than  the  Christians  Jerusalem. 
He  sees  men  rushing  into  Bastilles,  not  in  order  to 
tear  them  down,  but  in  order  to  inhabit  the  accursed 
cells. 

iWhen  I  say  that  this  pessimism  is  partly  ill-founded, 
I  mean  that  it  is  arrived  at  by  comparing  the  liberties 
of  the  Middle  Ages  with  the  tyrannies  of  to-day,  instead 
of  by  comparing  the  liberties  of  the  Middle  Ages  with 
the  liberties  of  to-day,  or  the  tyrannies  of  the  Middle 
Ages  with  the  tyrannies  of  to-day.  It  is  the  result, 
sometimes,  of  playing  with  history  and,  sometimes,  of 
playing  with  words.  Is  it  not  playing  with  words, 
for  instance,  to  glorify  the  charters  by  which  mediaeval 
kings  guaranteed  the  rights  and  privileges  of  their 
subjects,  and  to  deny  the  name  of  charter  to  such  a 
law  as  that  by  which  a  modern  State  guarantees  some 
of  the  rights  and  privileges  of  children — to  deny  it 
simply  on  the  ground  that  the  latter  expresses  itself 
largely  in  prohibitions?  It  may  be  necessary  to  forbid 
a  child  to  go  into  a  gin-palace  in  order  to  secure  it 
the  privilege  of  not  being  driven  into  a  gin-palace. 
Prohibitions  are  as  necessary  to  human  liberty  as 
permits  and  licences. 

At    the    same    time,    quarrel   as    we    may    with    Mr. 


MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AND   MR.   BELLOC    81 

Chesterton's  mediaivalism,  and  his  apphcation  of  it   to 
modern    problems,    we    can    seldom    quarrel    with    the 
motive    with    which    he    urges    it    upon    us.       His    high 
purpose    throughout    is  to   keep   alive   the   human    view 
of  society,  as  opposed  to  the  mechanical  view  to  which 
lazy  politicians  are  naturally  inclined.      If  he   has  not 
been   able   to   give   us   any   very   coherent    vision   of  a 
Utopia  of  his  own,  he  has,  at  least,  done  the  world  a 
service   in  dealing  some  smashing  blows  at  the  Utopia 
of  machinery.     None  the  less,  he  and  Mr.  Belloc  would 
be  the  most  dangerous  of  writers  to  follow  in  a  literal 
obedience.      In  regard  to  political  and  social  improve- 
ments,   they    are    too    often    merely    Devil's    Advocates 
of  genius.     But  that  is  a  necessary  function,  and  they 
are  something  more  than  that.      As  I  have  suggested, 
above    all    the    arguments    and    the    rhetoric    and    the 
humours    of   the    little    political   battles,    they    do    bear 
aloft    a    banner   with    a   strange    device,    reminding   us 
that  organized  society  was  made  for  man,  and  not  man 
for  organized  society.     That,  in  the  last  analysis,  is  the 
useful  thing  for  which  Mr.  Chesterton  and  Mr.  Belloc 
stand    in  modern  politics.      It  almost   seems   at   times, 
however,   as  though  they  were  ready  to  see  us  bound 
again  with  the   fetters  of  ancient   servitudes,   in  order 
to   compel  us   to  take   part   once   more   in   the  ancient 
struggle    for    freedom. 

2.  The  Copiousness  of  Mr.  Belloc 

Mr.  Belloc  has  during  the  last  four  or  five  years 
become  a  public  man.  Before  that  he  had  been 
acknowledged  a  man  of  genius.  But  even  the  fact 
that  he  had  sat  in  the  House  of  Commons  never  led 
any  great  section  of  Englishmen  to  reg'ard  him  as  a 
figure  or  an  institution.  He  was  generally  looked  on 
as  one  who  made  his  bed  aggressively  among  heretics, 
as  a  kind  of  Rabelaisian  dissenter,  as  a  settled 
interrupter,  half-rude  and  half-jesting.      And  yet  there 


32  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

was  always  in  him  something  of  the  pedagogue  who 
has  been  revealed  so  famously  in  these  last  months. 
Not  only  had  he  a  passion  for  facts  and  for  stringing 
facts  upon  theories.  He  had  also  a  high-headed  and 
dogmatic  and  assured  way  of  imparting  his  facts  and 
theories  to  the  human  race  as  it  sat — or  in  so  far  as 
it  could  be  persuaded  to  sit — on  its   little  forms. 

It  is  his  schoolmasterishness  which'  chiefly  distin- 
guishes the  genius  of  Mr.  Belloc  from  the  genius  of  his 
great  and  uproarious  comrade,  Mr.  Chesterton.  Mr. 
Belloc  is  not  a  humorist  to  anything  like  the  same 
degree  as  Mr.  Chesterton.  If  Mr.  Chesterton  were  a 
schoolmaster  he  would  give  all  the  triangles  noses  and 
eyes,  and  he  would  turn  the  Latin  verbs  into  nonsense 
rhymes.  Humour  is  his  breath  and  being.  He  cannot 
speak  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  or  of  Robert  Browning 
without  it  any  more  than  of  asparagus.  He  is  a 
laughing  theologian,  a  laughing  politician,  a  laughing 
critic,  a  laughing  philosopher.  He  retains  a  fantastic 
cheerfulness  even  amid  the  blind  furies — and  how 
blindly  furious  he  can  sometimes  be  ! — of  controversy. 
\Yith  Mr.  Belloc,  on  the  other  hand,  laughter  is  a 
separate  and  relinquishable  gift.  H:e  can  at  will  lay 
aside  the  mirth  of  one  who  has  broken  bounds  for 
the  solemnity  of  the  man  in  authority.  He  can  be 
scapegrace  prince  and  sober  king  by  turns,  and  in 
such  a  way  that  the  two  personalities  seem  scarcely 
to  be  related  to  each  other.  Compared  with  Mr. 
Chesterton  he  is  like  a  man  in  a  mask,  or  a  series  of 
masks.  He  reveals  more  of  his  intellect  to  the  world 
than  of  his  heart.  He  is  not  one  of  those  authors 
whom  one  reads  with  a  sense  of  personal  intimacy. 
He  is  too  arrogant  even  in  his  merriment  for  that. 

Perhaps  the  figure  we  see  reflected  most  obtrusively 
in  his  works  is  that  of  a  man  delighting  in  immense 
physical  and  intellectual  energies.  It  is  this  that  makes 
him  one  of  the  happiest  of  travellers.  On  his  travels, 
one   feels,   every   inch  and  nook  of  his  being  is  intent 


MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AND  MR.   BELLOC    33 

upon  the  passing  earth.      The  world  is  to  him  at  once 
a  map  and  a  history  and  a  poem  and  a  church  and  an 
ale-house.      The  birds  in  the  greenwood,  the  beer,  the 
site  of  an  old  battle,  the  meaning  of  an  old  road,  sacred 
emblems    by   the    roadside,   the   comic    events    of   way- 
faring— he   has   an  equal  appetite  for  them   all.      H!as 
he   not   made   a   perfect   book   of  these   things,    with   a 
thousand   fancies   added,   in    The   Four  Men  ?      In    The 
Four   Men   he   has   written  a   travel-book    which   more 
than    any    other    of   his    works    has    something    of    the 
passion   of   a   personal   confession.      Here    the    pilgrim 
becomes   nearly  genial  as  he  indulges  in   his  humours 
against  the  rich  and  against  policemen  and  in  behalf  of 
Sussex  against  Kent  and  the  rest  of  the  inhabited  world. 
Mr.    Chesterton   has   spoken   of  Mr.    Belloc    as   on© 
who  "  did  and  does  humanly  and  heartily  love  England, 
not    as    a    duty    but    as    a    pleasure,    and    almost  an; 
indulgence."     And   The  Four  Men  expresses  this   love 
humorously,  inconsequently,  and  with  a  grave  stepping 
eloquence.      There   are  few  speeches  in  modern  books 
better  than  the  conversations  in  The  Four  'Men.     Mr. 
Belloc    is    not   one   of  those    disciples   of   realism   who, 
believe   that  the  art  of  conversation  is   dead,  and  that 
modern    people    are    only   capable   of   addressing    each! 
other    in    one-line    sentences.      He   has'   the    traditional 
love  of  the  fine  speech  such  as  we  find  it  in  the  ancient 
poets  and  historians  and  dramatists  and  satirists.      He 
loves  a  monologue  that  passes  from  mockery  to  regret, 
that  gathers  up  by  the  way  anecdote  and  history  and 
essay   and   foolery,   that   is   half   a   narrative    of   things 
seen   and    half  an   irresponsible   imagination.      He   can 
describe  a  runaway  horse  with  the   farcical   realism  of 
the  authors  of  Some  Experiences  of  an  Irish  R.M.,  can 
parody   a   judge,   can   paint  a   portrait,    and   can   steep 
a     landscape     in     vision.       Two     recent     critics     have 
described  him  as  "  the  best  EngHsh  prose  writer  since 
Dryden,"   but  that  only  means   that   Mr.    Belloc's   rush 
of  genius  has  quite  naturally  swept  them  ofl  their  feet.. 

3 


84  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

If  Mr.  Belloc's  love  of  country  is  an  indulgence, 
his  moods  of  suspicion  and  contempt  are  something, 
of  the  same  kind.  He  is  nothing  of  a  philanthropist  in 
any  sense  of  the  word.  He  has  no  illusions  about  the 
virtue  of  the  human  race.  He  takes  pleasure  in  scorn, 
and  there  is  a  flavour  of  bitterness  in  his  jests.  His 
fiction  largely  belongs  to  the  comedy  of  corruption. 
He  enjoys — and  so  do  we — the  thought  of  the  poet 
in  Sussex  who  had  no  money  except  three  shillings, 
"  and  a  French  penny,  which  last  some  one  had  given 
him  out  of  charity,  taking  him  for  a  beggar  a  little  way, 
out  of  Brightling  that  very  day."  WJien  he  describes 
the  popular  rejoicings  at  the  result  of  Mr.  Clutterbuck's 
election,  he  comments  :  "  The  populace  were  wild  with 
joy  at  their  victory,  and  that  portion  of  them  who  as 
bitterly  mourned  defeat  would  have  been  roughly 
handled  had  they  not  numbered  quite  half  this  vast 
assembly  of  human  beings."  He  is  satirist  and  ironist 
even  more  than  historian.  His  ironical  essays  are  the 
best  of  their  kind  that  have  been  written  in  recent 
years. 

Mr.  Mandell  and  Mr.  Shanks  in  their  little  study, 
Hilaire  Belloc :  the  Man  and  his  Work,  are  more  success- 
ful in  their  exposition  of  Mr.  Belloc's  theory  of  history 
and  the  theory  of  politics  which  has  risen  out  of  it — • 
or  out  of  which  it  has  risen— than  they  are  in  their 
definition  of  him  as  a  man  of  letters.  They  have 
written  a  lively  book  on  him,  but  they  do  not  suffi- 
ciently communicate  an  impression  of  the  kind  of  his 
exuberance,  of  his  thrusting  intellectual  ardour,  of  his 
pomp  as  a  narrator,  of  his  blind  and  doctrinaire 
injustices,  of  his  jesting  like  a  Roman  Emperor's,  of 
the  strength  of  his  happiness  upon  a  journey,  of  his 
buckishness,  of  the  queer  lack  of  surprising  phrases 
in  his  work,  of  his  measured  omniscience,  of  the 
immense  weight  of  tradition  in  the  manner  of  his 
writing.  There  are  many  contemporary  writers  whose 
work  seems  to  be  a  development  of  journalism.     Mr. 


MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AND  MR.   BELLOC    35 

Belloc's  is  the  child  of  four  literatures,  or,  maybe, 
half  a  dozen.  He  often  writes  carelessly,  sometimes 
dully,  but  there  is  the  echo  of  greatness  in  his  work., 
He  is  one  of  the  few  contemporary  men  of  genius  whose 
books  are  under-estimated  rather  than  over-estimated. 
He  is  an  author  who  has  brought  back  to  the  world 
something  of  the  copiousness,  fancy,  appetite,  power, 
and  unreason  of  the  talk  that,  one  imagines,  was  once 
to  be  heard  in  the  Mermaid  Tavern. 


3.  The  Two  Mr.  Chestertons 

I  cannot  help  wishing  at  times  that  Mr.  Chesterton 
could  be  divided  in  two.  One  half  of  him  I  should  like 
to  challenge  to  mortal  combat  as  an  enemy  of  the  human 
race.  The  other  half  I  would  carry  shoulder-high  through 
the  streets.  For  Mr.  Chesterton  is  at  once  detestable 
and  splendid.  He  is  detestable  as  a  doctrinaire  :  he 
is  splendid  as  a  sage  and  a  poet  who  juggles  with  stars 
and  can  keep  seven  of  them  in  the  air  at  a  time. 
For,  if  he  is  a  gamester,  it  is  among  the  lamps  of 
Heaven.  We  can  see  to  read  by  his  sport.  He  writes 
in  flashes,  and  hidden  and  fantastic  truths  suddenly  show 
their   faces   in   the  play  of  his   sentences. 

Unfortunately,  his  two  personalities  have  become  so 
confused  that  his  later  books  sometimes  strike  one  as 
being  not  so  much  a  game  played  with  light  as  a  game 
of  hide-and-seek  between  light  and  darkness.  In  the 
darkness  he  mutters  incantations  to  the  monstrous 
tyrannies  of  old  time  :  in  the  light  he  is  on  his  knees 
to  liberty.  He  vacillates  between  superstition  and  faith. 
His  is  a  genius  at  once  enslaved  and  triumphantly 
rebel.  This  fatal  duality  is  seen  again  and  again  in 
his  references  to  the  tyrannies  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
Thus  he  writes  :  "It  need  not  be  repeated  that  the 
case  for  despotism  is  democratic.  As  a  rule  its  cruelty 
to  the  strong  is  kindness  to  the  weak."  I  confess  I 
do  not  know  the  "  rule  "  to  which  Mr.  Chesterton  refers. 


36  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

The  picture  of  the  despot  as  a  good  creature  who  shields 
the  poor  from  the  rich  is  not  to  be  found  among  the 
facts  of  history.  The  ordinary  despot,  in  his  attitude 
to  the  common  people  suffering  from  the  oppressions 
of  their  lords,  is  best  portrayed  in  the  fable — if  it  be 
a  fable — of  Marie  Antoinette  and  her  flippancy  about 
eating   cake. 

I  fancy,  however,  Mr.  Chesterton's  defence  of  despots 
is  not  the  result  of  any  real  taste  for  them  or  acquaintance 
with  their  history  :  it  is  due  simply  to  his  passion  for 
extremes.  He  likes  a  man,  as  the  vulgar  say,  to  be 
either  one  thing  or  the  other.  You  must  be  either  a 
Pope  or  a  revolutionist  to  please  him.  He  loves  the 
visible  rhetoric  of  things,  and  the  sober  suits  of  com- 
fortable citizens  seem  dull  and  neutral  in  comparison 
with  the  red  of  cardinals  on  the  one  hand,  and  of  caps 
of  liberty  on  the  other.  This,  I  think,  explains  Mr. 
Chesterton's  indifference  to,  if  not  dislike  of,  Parlia- 
ments. Parliaments  are  monuments  of  compromise,  and 
are  guilty  of  the  sin  of  unpicturesqueness.  One  would 
imagine  that  a  historian  of  England  who  did  not  care 
for  Parliaments  would  be  as  hopelessly  out  of  his  element 
as  a  historian  of  Greece  who  did  not  care  for  the  arts. 
And  it  is  because  Mr.  Chesterton  is  indifferent  to  so 
much  in  the  English  genius  and  character  that  he  has 
given  us  in  his  recent  short  History  of  England,  instead 
of  a  History  of  England,  a  wild  and  wonderful  pageant 
of  argument.  "  Already,"  he  cries,  as  he  relates  how 
Parliament  "  certainly  encouraged,  and  almost  certainly 
obliged  "  King  Richard  to  break  his  pledge  to  the  people 
after  the  Wat  Tyler  insurrection :  — 

Already    Parliament   is   not    merely   a   governing    body,    but    a 
governing  class. 

The  history  of  England  is  to  Mr.  Chesterton  largely 
the  history  of  the  rise  of  the  governing  class.  He 
blames  John  Richard  Green  for  leaving  the  people  out 
of  his  history  ;    but  Mr.  Chesterton  himself  has  left  out 


MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AND   MR.   BELLOC    37 


the  people  as  effectually  as  any  of  the  historians  who 
went  before  him.  The  obsession  of  "  the  governing 
class  "  has  thrust  the  people  into  the  background. 
History  resolves  itself  with  him  into  a  disgraceful  epic 
of  a  governing  class  which  despoiled  Pope  and  King 
with  the  right  hand,  and  the  people  with  the  left.  It 
is  a  disgraceful  epic  patched  with  splendid  episodes, 
but  it  culminates  in  an  appalling  cry  of  doubt  whether, 
after  all,  it  might  not  be  better  for  England  to  perish 
utterly  in  the  great  war  while  fighting  for  liberty  than  to 
survive  to  behold  the  triumph  of  the  "  governing  class  " 
in  a  servile  State  of  old-age  pensions  and  Insurance 
Acts. 

This  theory  of  history,  as  being  largely  the  story  of 
the  evolution  of  the  "  governing  class,"  is  an  ex- 
tremely interesting  and  even  "  fruitful  "  theory.  But 
it  is  purely  fantastic  unless  we  bear  in  mind  that  the 
governing  class  has  been  continually  compelled  to  enlarge 
itself,  and  that  its  tendency  is  reluctantly  to  go  on 
doing  so  until  in  the  end  it  will  be  coterminous  with 
the  "  governed  class."  History  is  a  tale  of  exploitation, 
but  it  is  also  a  tale  of  liberation,  and  the  over-emphasis 
that  Mr.  Chesterton  lays  on  exploitation  by  Parliaments 
as  compared  with  exploitation  by  Popes  and  Kings,  can 
only  be  due  to  infidelity  in  regard  to  some  of  the  central 
principles  of  freedom.  Surely  it  is  possible  to  condemn 
the  Insurance  Act,  if  it  must  be  condemned,  without 
apologizing  either  for  the  Roman  Empire  or  for  the 
Roman  ecclesiastical  system.  Mr.  Chesterton,  however, 
believes  in  giving  way  to  one's  prejudices.  He  says 
that  history  should  be  written  backwards  ;  and  what 
does  this  mean  but  that  it  should  be  dyed  in  prejudice? 
Thus,  he  cannot  refer  to  the  Hanoverian  succession  with- 
out indulging  in  a  sudden  outburst  of  heated  rhetoric 
such  as  one  might  expect  rather  in  a  leading  article 
in  war-time.     He  writes  :— 

With  George  there  entered  England  something  that  had  scarcely 
been  seen  there  before  ;    something  hardly  mentioned  in  mediaeval 


88  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 


or  Renascence  writing,  except  as  one  mentions  a  Hottentot — 
the  barbarian   from  beyond  the  Rhine. 

Similarly,  his  characterization  of  the  Revolution  of  1688 
is  largely  a  result  of  his  dislike  of  the  governing  classes 
at   the   present   hour  : — 

The  Revolution  reduced  us  to  a  country  wholly  governed  by 
gentlemen  ;  the  popular  universities  and  schools  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  like  their  guilds  and  abbeys,  had  been  seized  and  turned 
into  what  they  are — factories  of  gentlemen  when  they  are  not 
merely  factories  of  snobs. 

Both  of  these  statements  contain  a  grain  of  truth,  but 
neither  of  them  contains  enough  truth  to  be  true.  One 
might  describe  them  as  sweetmeats  of  history  of  small 
nutritious  value.  One  might  say  the  same  of  his  com- 
ment on  the  alliance  between  Chatham  and  Frederick 
the   Great  : — 

The  cannibal  theory  of  a  commonwealth,  that  it  can  of  its  nature 
eat  other  commonwealths,  had  entered  Christendom. 

How  finely  said  I  But,  alas  !  the  cannibal  theory  of 
a  commonwealth  existed  long  before  Chatham  and 
Frederick  the  Great.  The  instinct  to  exploit  is  one 
of  the  most  venerable  instincts  of  the  human  race, 
whether  in  individual  men  or  in  nations  of  men  ;  and 
ancient  Hebrew  and  ancient  Greek  and  ancient  Roman 
had  exhausted  the  passion  of  centuries  in  obedience  to 
it  before  the  language  spoken  either  by  Chatham  or  by 
Frederick  was  born.  Christian  Spain,  Christian  France, 
and  Christian  England  had  not  in  this  matter  disowned 
the  example  of  their  Jewish  and  Pagan  forerunners. 
What  we  are  infinitely  grateful  to  Mr.  Chesterton 
for,  however,  is  that  he  has  sufficient  imagination  to 
loathe  cannibalism  wherever  he  sees  it.  True,  he  seems 
to  forgive  certain  forms  of  cannibalism  on  the  ground 
that  it  is  an  exaggeration  to  describe  the  flesh  of  a 
rich  man  as  the  flesh  of  a  human  being.  But  he 
does   rage  with  genius  at  the  continual  eating  of  men 


MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AND  MR.   BELLOC    89 

that  went  on  in  England,  especially  after  the  spolia- 
tion of  the  monasteries  in  the  reign  of  Henry  the  Eighth 
gave  full  scope  to  the  greed  of  the  strong.  He  sees 
that  the  England  which  Whig  and  Tory  combined  to 
defend  as  the  perfection  of  the  civilized  world  in  the 
eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries  was  an  England 
governed  by  men  whose  chief  claim  to  govern  was 
founded  on  the  fact  that  they  had  seized  their  country 
and  were  holding  it  against  their  countrymen.  Mr. 
Chesterton  rudely  shatters  the  mirror  of  perfection  in 
which  the  possessing  class  have  long  seen  themselves. 
He  writes  in  a  brilliant  passage  : — 

It  could  truly  be  said  of  the  English  gentleman,  as  of  another 
gallant  and  gracious  individual,  that  his  honour  stood  rooted  in 
dishonour.  He  was,  indeed,  somewhat  in  the  position  of  such  an 
aristocrat  of  romance,  whose  splendour  has  the  dark  spot  of  a 
secret  and  a  sort  of  blackmail.  .  .  .  His  glory  did  not  come  from 
the  Crusades,  but  from  the  Great  Pillage.  .  .  .  The  oligarchs  were 
descended  from  usurers  and  thieves.  That,  for  good  or  evil,  was 
the  paradox  of  England  ;  the  typical  aristocrat  was  the  typical 
upstart. 

But  the  secret  was  worse  ;  not  only  was  such  a  family  founded 
on  stealing,  but  the  family  was  stealing  still.  It  is  a  grim  truth 
that,  all  through  the  eighteenth  century,  all  through  the  great  Whig 
speeches  about  liberty,  all  through  the  great  Tory  speeches  about 
patriotism,  through  the  period  of  Wandiwash  and  Plassey,  through 
the  period  of  Trafalgar  and  Waterloo,  one  process  was  steadily 
going  on  in  the  central  senate  of  the  nation.  Parliament  was 
passing  Bill  after  Bill  for  the  enclosure  by  the  great  landlords  of 
such  of  the  common  lands  as  had  survived  out  of  the  great  com- 
munal system  of  the  Middle  Ages.  It  is  much  more  than  a  pun, 
it  is  the  prime  political  irony  of  our  history  that  the  Commons 
were  destroying  the  commons. 

It  would  be  folly  to  suggest,  however,  that,  conscious 
though  Mr.  Chesterton  is  of  the  crimes  of  history,  he 
has  turned  history  into  a  mere  series  of  floggings  of 
criminals.  He  is  for  ever  laying  down  the  whip  and  in- 
viting the  criminals  to  take  their  seats  while  he  paints 
gorgeous  portraits  of  them  in  all  the  colours  of  the 
rainbow.     His  praise  of  the  mighty  rhetoricians  of  the 


40  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

eighteenth  century  could  in  some  passages  scarcely  be 
more  unstinted  if  he  were  a  Whig  of  the  Whigs.  He 
cannot  but  admire  the  rotund  speech  and  swelling 
adventures  of  those  days.  If  we  go  farther  back,  we 
find  him  portraying  even  the  Puritans  with  a  strange 
splendour    of    colour  : — 

They  were,  above  all  things,  anti-historic,  like  the  Futurists 
in  Italy  ;  and  there  was  this  unconscious  greatness  about  them, 
that  their  very  sacrilege  was  public  and  solemn,  like  a  sacrament ; 
and  they  were  ritualists  even  as  iconoclasts.  It  was,  properly 
considered,  but  a  very  secondary  example  of  their  strange  and 
violent  simplicity  that  one  of  them,  before  a  mighty  mob  at  White- 
hall, cut  off  the  anointed  head  of  the  sacramental  man  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  For  another,  far  away  in  the  western  shires,  cut  down  the 
thorn  of  Glastonbury,  from  which  had  grown  the  whole  story  of 
Britain. 

This  last  passage  is  valuable,  not  only  because  it 
reveals  Mr.  Chesterton  as  a  marvellous  rhetorician  doing 
the  honours  of  prose  to  his  enemies,  but  because  it 
helps  to  explain  the  essentially  tragic  view  he  takes 
of  English  history.  I  exaggerated  a  moment  ago  when 
I  said  that  to  Mr.  Chesterton  English  history  is  the 
story  of  the  rise  of  a  governing  class.  What  it  reajly 
is  to  him  is  the  story  of  a  thorn-bush  cut  down  by  a 
Puritan.  He  has  hung  all  the  candles  of  his  faith  on 
the  sacred  thorn,  like  the  lights  on  a  Christmas-tree, 
and  lo  1  it  has  been  cut  down  and  cast  out  of  England 
with  as  little  respect  as  though  it  were  ,a  verse  from 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  It  may  be  that  Mr. 
Chesterton's  sight  is  erratic,  and  that  what  he  took 
to  be  the  sacred  thorn  was  really  a  Upas-tree.  But 
in  a  sense  that  does  not  matter.  He  is  entitled  to  his 
own  fable,  if  he  tells  it  honestly  and  beautifully  ;  and 
it  is  as  a  tragic  fable  or  rom,ance  of  the  downfall  of 
liberty  in  England  that  one  reads  his  History.  He 
himself  contends  in  the  last  chapter  of  the  book  that  the 
crisis  in  English  history  came  "  with  the  fall  of 
Richard   II,   following   on  his   failures   to   use  mediaeval 


MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AND   MR.   BELLOC    41 

despotism  in  the  interests  of  mediLeval  democracy."  Mr. 
Chesterton's  history  would  hardly  be  worth  reading,  if 
he  had  made  nothing  more  of  it  than  is  suggested 
in  that  sentence.  His  book  (apart  from  occasional 
sloughs  of  sophistry  and  fallacious  argument)  remains 
in  the  mind  as  a  song  of  praise  and  dolour  chanted  by 
the  imagination  about  an  England  that  obeyed  not 
God  and  despised  the  Tree  of  Life,  but  that  may  yet, 
he  believes,  hear  once  more  the  ancestral  voices,  and 
with  her  sons  arrayed  in  trade  unions  and  guilds,  march 
riotously  back  into  the  Garden  of  Eden. 


IV, 
WORDSWORTH 

1.  His  Personality  and  Genius 

Dorothy  Wordsworth— whom  Professor  Harper  has 
praised  not  beyond  reason  as  "  the  most  dehghtful,  the 
most  fascinating  woman  who  has  enriched  Hterary 
history  " — once  confessed  in  a  letter  about  her  brother 
WilHam  that  "  his  person  is  not  in  his  favour,"  and 
that  he  was  "  certainly  rather  plain."  He  is  the  most 
difficult  of  all  the  great  poets  whom  one  reverences  to 
portray  as  an  attractive  person.  "  *  Horse -face,'  I  have 
heard  satirists  say,"  Carlyle  wrote  of  him,  recalling  a 
comparison  of  Hazlitt's  ;  and  the  horse-face  seems  to 
be  symbolic  of  something  that  we  find  not  only  in  his 
personal  appearance,  but  in  his  personality  and  his  work. 

His  faults  do  not  soften  us,  as  the  faults  of  so  many 
favourite  writers  do.  They  were  the  faults,  not  of  passion, 
but  of  a  superior  person,  who  was  something  of  a  Sir 
Willoughby  Patteme  in  his  pompous  self-satisfaction. 
"  He  says,"  records  Lamb  in  one  of  his  letters,  "  he 
does  not  see  much  difficulty  in  writing  like  Shakespeare, 
if  he  had  a  mind  to  try  it."  Lamb  adds  :  "  It  is  clear 
that  nothing   is  wanting  but  the  mind." 

Leigh  Hunt,  after  receiving  a  visit  from  Wordsworth 
in  1815,  remarked  that  "he  was  as  sceptical  on  the 
merit  of  all  kinds  of  poetry  but  one  as  Richardson 
was  on  those  of  the  novels  of  Fielding."  Keats,  who 
had  earlier  spoken  of  the  reverence  in  which  he  held 
Wordsworth,  wrote  to  his  brother  in  181 8:  "I  am 
sorry  that  Wordsworth  has  left  a  bad  impression 
wherever  he  visited  in  town  by  his  egotism,  vanity,  and 

42 


WORDSWORTH  43 

bigotry."  There  was  something  frigidly  unsympathetic 
in  his  judgment  of  others,  which  was  as  unattractive 
as  his  complacency  in  regard  to  his  own  work.  Wlhen 
Trelawny,  seeing  him  at  Lausanne  and,  learning  who 
he  was,  went  up  to  him  as  he  was  about  to  step  into 
his  carriage  and  asked  him  what  he  thought  of  Shelley 
as  a  poet,  he  replied  :  '*  Nothing."  Again,  Wordsworth 
spoke  with  solemn  reprobation  of  certain  of  Lamb's 
friendships,  after  Lamb  was  dead,  as  "  the  indulgences 
of  social  humours  and  fancies  which  were  often  injurious 
to  himself  and  causes  of  severe  regrets  to  his  friends, 
without  really  benefiting  the  object  of  his  misapplied 
kindness." 

Nor  was  this  attitude  of  Johnny  Head-in-Air  the 
mark  only  of  his  later  years.  It  appeared  in  the  days 
when  he  and  Coleridge  collaborated  in  bringing  out 
Lyrical  Ballads.  There  is  something  sublimely  egotistical 
in  the  way  in  which  he  shook  his  head  over  The  Ancient 
Mariner  as  a  drag  upon  that  miraculous  volume.  In 
the  course  of   a  letter   to   his   publisher,  he   wrote  : — 

From  what  I  can  gather  it  seems  that  The  Ancyent  Mariner e 
has,  on  the  whole,  been  an  injury  to  the  volume  ;  I  mean  that  the 
old  words  and  the  strangeness  of  it  have  deterred  readers  from 
going  on.  If  the  volume  should  come  to  a  second  edition,  I  would 
put  in  its  place  some  little  things  which  would  be  more  likely  to 
suit  the  common  taste. 

It  is  when  one  reads  sentences  like  these. that  one 
begins  to  take  a  mischievous  delight  in  the  later  on- 
slaught of  a  Scottish  reviewer  who,  indignant  that 
Wordsworth  should  dare  to  pretend  to  be  able  to 
appreciate  Bums,  denounced  him  as  "  a  retired,  pensive, 
egotistical,   collector  of  stamps,"  and  as — 

a  melancholy,  sighing,  half-parson  sort  of  gentleman,  who  lives 
in  a  small  circle  of  old  maids  and  sonneteers,  and  drinks  tea  now 
and   then   with  the  solemn   Laureate. 

One  feels  at  times  that  no  ridicule  or  abuse  of  this 
stiff-necked  old  fraud   could   be   excessive  ;     for,    if  he 


44  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

were  not  Wordsworth,  as  what  but  a  fraud  could  we 
picture  him  in  his  later  years,  as  he  protests  ag'ainst 
<rks'»A  Catholic  Emancipation,  the  extension  of  the  franchise, 
the  freedom  of  ttieTress,  and  popUlar  education?  "Can 
it,  in  a  general  view,"  he  asks,  ^^Be~  gooH"^at  an 
infant  should  learn  much  which  its  parents  do  not  know? 
Will  not  a  child  arrogate  a  superiority  unfavourable 
to  love  and  obedience?  "  He  shuddered  again  at  the 
likelihood  that  Mechanics'  Institutes  would  "  make  dis- 
contented spirits  and  insubordinate  and  presumptuous 
workmen."  He  opposed  the  admission  of  Dissenters 
to  Cambridge  University,  and  he  "  desired  that  a  medical 
education  should  be  kept  beyond  the  reach  of  a  poor 
student,"  on  the  ground  that  "  the  better  able  the  parents 
are  to  incur  expense,  the  stronger  pledge  have  we  of 
their  children  being  above  meanness  and  unfeeling  and 
sordid  habits."  One  might  go  on  quoting  instance  after 
instance  of  this  piety  of  success,  as  it  might  be  called. 
Time  and  again  the  words  seem  to  come  from  the  mouth, 
not  of  one  of  the  inspired  men  of  the  modern  world, 
but  of  some  puffed-up  elderly  gentleman  in  a  novel 
by  Jane  Austen.  His  letter  to  a  young  relation  who 
wished  to  marry  his  daughter  Dora  is  a  letter  that 
Jane  Austen  might  have  invented  : — 

If  you  have  thoughts  of  marrying,  do  look  out  for  some  lady 
with  a  sufficient  fortune  for  both  of  you.  What  I  say  to  you  now 
I  would  recommend  to  every  naval  officer  and  clergyman  who  is 
without  prospect  of  professional  advancement.  Ladies  of  some 
fortune  are  as  easily  won  as  those  without,  and  for  the  most  part 
as  deserving.     Check  the  first  liking  to  those  who  have  nothing. 

One  is  tempted  to  say  that  Wordsworth,  like  so  many 
other  poets,  died  young,  and  that  a  pensioner  who 
inherited    his    name    survived   him. 

When  one  has  told  the  worst  about  Wordsworth, 
however,  one  is  as  far  as  ever  from  having  painted 
a  portrait  of  him  in  which  anybody  could  believe  while 
reading   the    Ode  on   Intimations  of  Immortality — Ode 


WORDSWORTH  45 


as  it  was  simply  called  when  it  was  first  published — or 
/  wandered  lonely  as  a  cloud,  or  the  sonnet  composed 
on  Westminster  Bridge.  Nor  does  the  portrait  of  a 
stern,  unbending  egotist  satisfy  us  when  we  remember 
the  life-long  devotion  that  existed  between  him  and 
Dorothy,  and  the  fact  that  Coleridge  loved  him,  and 
that  Lamb,  and  Scott  were  his  friends.  He  may  have 
been  a  niggard  of  warm-heartedness  to  the  outside 
world,  but  it  is  clear  from  his  biography  that  he 
possessed  the  genius  of  a  good  heart  as  well  as  of  a 
great  mind. 

And  he  was  as  conspicuous  for  the  public  as  for  the 
private  virtues.  His  latest  biographer  has  done  well  to 
withdraw  our  eyes  from  the  portrait  of  the  old  man  with 
the  stiffened  joints  and  to  paint  in  more  glowing  colours 
than  any  of  his  predecessors  the  early  .Wordsworth 
who  rejoiced  in  the  French  Revolution,  and,  apparently 
as  a  consequence,  initiated  a  revolution  in  English 
poetry.  The  later  period  of  the  life  is  not  glossed  over  ; 
it  is  given,  indeed,  in  cruel  detail,  and  Professor 
Harper's  account  of  it  is  the  most  lively  and  fascinating 
part  of  his  admirable  book.  But  it  is  to  the  heart  of 
the  young  revolutionary,  who  dreamed  of  becoming  a 
Girondist  leader  and  of  seeing  England  a  republic,  that 
he  traces  all  the  genius  and  understanding  that  we 
find    in   the   poems.  i 

"  Wordsworth's  connection,"-  he  writes,  "  with  the 
English  '  Jacobins,'  with  the  most  extreme  element 
opposed  to  the  war  or  actively  agitating  in  favour  of 
making  England  a  republic,  was  much  closer  than 
has  been  generally  admitted."  He  points  out  that 
Wordsworth's  first  books  of  verse.  An  Evening  Walk, 
and  Descriptive  Sketches,  were  published  by  Joseph 
Johnson,  w^ho  also  published  Dr.  Priestley,  Home 
Tooke,  and  Mary  Wollstonecraft,  and  whose  shop  was 
frequented  by  Godwin  and  Paine.  Professor  Harper 
attempts  to  strengthen  his  case  by  giving  brief  sketches 
of  famous  "  Jacobins,"  whom  Wordsworth  may  or  may 


46  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

not  have  met,  but  his  case  is  strong,  enough  without 
their  help.  iWordsworth's  reply — not  published  at  the 
time,  or,  indeed,  till  after  his  death — to  the  Bishop 
of  Llandaff's  anti-French-Revolution  sermon  on  The 
Wisdom  and  Goodness  of  God  in  having  made  botJi 
Rich  and  Poor,  v^as  signed  without  qualification,  "  By 
a  Republican."  He  refused  to  join  in  "  the  idle  cry  of 
modish  lamentation  "  over  the  execution  of  the  French 
King,  and  defended  the  other  executions  in  France  as 
necessary.  He  condemned  the  hereditary  principle, 
whether  in  the  Monarchy  or  the  House  of  Lords.  The 
existence  of  a  nobility,  he  held,  "  has  a  necessary 
tendency  to  dishonour  labour."  Had  he  published  this 
pamphlet  when  it  was  written,  in  1793,  he  might 
easily  have  found  himself  in  prison,  like  many  other 
sympathizers  with  the  French. 

tWordsworth  gives  us  an  idea  in  The  Prelude— how 
one  wishes  one  had  the  original  and  unamended-xerjion 
oFlflie  poern^s  it  was  finished  in  1805'  1 — of  the  extreme 
lengtns~to~wKichrTTis "Republican  idealism  carried  him. 
When  war  was  declared  against  France,  he  tells  us, 
he  prayed   for  French  victories,  and — 

Exulted  in  the  triumph  of  my  soul. 
When  Englishmen  by  thousands  were  o'erthrown. 
Left  without  glory  on  the  field,  or  driven. 
Brave  hearts  !  to  shameful  flight. 

Two  years  later  we,  find  him  at  Racedown  planning 
satires  against  the  King,  the  Prince  of  Wales,  and 
various  public  men,  one  of  the  couplets  on  the  King 
and   the   Duke  of   Norfolk   running  : — 

Heavens  !  who  sees  majesty  in  George's  face  ? 
Or  looks  at  Norfolk,  and  can  dream  of  grace  ? 

But  these  lines,  he  declared,  were  given  to  him  by 
Southey. 

By  1797  a  Government  spy  seems  to  have  been 
looking   after   him  and   his  friends  :    he   was   living  at 


WORDSWORTH  47 


the  time  at  Alfoxden,  near  Coleridge,  who,  in  the 
previous  year,  had  brought  out  The  Watchman)  to 
proclaim,  as  the  prospectus  said,  "  the  state  of  the 
pohtical  atmosphere,  and  preserve  Freedom  and  her 
P^riends  from  the  attacks  of  Robbers  and  Assassins." 
Wordsworth  at  a  later  period  did  not  like  the  story 
of  the  spy,  but  it  is  certain  that  about  the  time  of  the 
visit  he  got  notice  to  quit  Alfoxden,  obviously  for 
political  reasons,  from  the  lady  who  owned  the 
estate. 

Professor  Harper's  originality  as  a  biographer, 
however,  does  not  lie  in  his  narration  of  facts  like 
these,  but  in  the  patience  with  which'  he  traces  the 
continuance  of  French  sympathies  in  Wordsworth  on 
into  the  opening  years  of  the  nineteenth  century.  He 
has  altered  the  proportions  in  the  Wordsworth  legend, 
and  made  the  youth  of  the  poet  as  long  in  the  telling 
as  his  age.  This  was  all  the  more  necessary  because 
various  biographers  have  followed  too  closely  the 
example  of  the  official  Life,  the  materials  for  which 
Wordsworth  entrusted  to  his  nephew,  the  Bishop,  who 
naturally  regarded  Wordsworth,  the  pillar  of  Church 
and  State,  as  a  more  eminent  and  laudable  figure  than 
Wordsworth,  the  young  Revolutionary.  Whether  the 
Bishop  deliberately  hushed  up'  the  fact  that,  during 
his  early  travels  in  France,  Wordsworth  fell  in  love 
with  an  aristocratic  French  lady  who  bore  him  an 
illegitimate  child,  I  do  not  know.  Professor  Harper, 
taking  a  more  ruthless  view  of  the  duties  of  a 
biographer,  now  relates  the  story,  though  in  a  rather 
vague  and  mysterious  Way.  One  wishes  that,  having 
told  us  so  much,  he  had  told  us  a  little  more.  Even 
with  all  we  know  about  the  early  life  of  Wordsworth, 
we  are  still  left  guessing  at  his  portrait  rather  than 
with  a  clear  idea  of  it.  He  was  a  figure  in  his  youth,  a 
character  in  his  old  age.  The  character  we  know 
doAvn  to  the  roots  of  his  hair.  But  the  figure  remains 
something   of   a   secrqt. 


48  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

As  a  poet,  Wordsworth  may  almost  be  called  the 
first  of  the  democrats.  He  brought  into  literature  a 
fresh  vision — a  vision  bathing  the  world  and  its 
inhabitants  in  a  strange  and  revolutionary  light.  He 
•was  the  first  great  poet  of  equality  and  fraternity  in 
the  sense  that  he  portrayed  the  lives  of  common  country 
people  in  their  daily  surroundings  as  faithfully  as  though 
they  had  been  kings.  It  would  be  absurd  to  suggest 
that  there  are  no  anticipations  of  this  democratic  spirit 
in  English  literature  from  Chaucer  down  to  Burns,  but 
(Wordsworth,  more  than  any  other  English  writer, 
deserves  the  credit  of  having  emancipated  the  poor 
man  into  being  a  fit  subject  for  noble  poetry.  How 
revolutionary  a  change  this  was  it  is  difficult  to  realize 
at  the  present  day,  but  Jeffrey's  protest  against  it  in 
the  Edinburgh  Revien^'  in  1802  enables  one  to  realize 
to  what  a  degree  the  poor  man  was  regarded  as  an 
outcast  from  literature  when  Wordsworth  was  young. 
In  the  course  of  an  attack  on  Lyrical  Ballads  Jefi"rey 
wrote  : — 

The  love,  or  grief,  or  indignation,  of  an  enlightened  and  refined 
character  is  not  only  expressed  in  a  different  language,  but  is  in 
itself  a  different  emotion  from  the  love,  or  grief,  or  anger,  of  a  clown, 
a  tradesman,  or  a  market-wench.  The  things  themselves  are 
radically  and  obviously  distinct.  .  .  .  The  poor  and  vulgar  may 
interest  us,  in  poetry,  by  their  situation  ;  but  never,  we  apprehend, 
by  any  sentiments  that  are  peculiar  to  their  condition,  and  still 
less   by   any   language   that  is   peculiar   to   it. 

iWhen  one  takes  sides  with  Wordsworth  against 
Jeffrey  on  this  matter  it  is  not  because  one  regards 
Wordsworth  as  a  portrait-painter  without  faults.  His 
portraits  are  marred  in  several  cases  by  the  intrusion 
of  his  own  personality  with  its  "  My  good  man  "  and 
"  My  little  man  "  air.  His  hunaan  beings  have  a  way 
of  becoming  either  lifeless  or  absurd  when  they  talk. 
The  Leech-Gatherer  and  The  Idiot  Boy  are  not  the 
only  poems  of  Wordsworth  that  are  injured  by  the 
insertion  of  banal  dialogue.     It  isi  as  though  there  were. 


WORDSWORTH  49 


despite  his  passion  for  liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity, 
a  certain  gaucherie  in  his  relations  with  other  human 
beings,  and  he  were  at  his  happiest  as  a  solitary.  His 
nature,  we  may  grant,  was  of  mixed  aspects,  but,  even 
as  early  as  the  1807  Poems  in  Tu^v  Volumes  had 
he  not  expressed  his  impatience  of  human  society  in 
a  sonnet? — 

I  am  not  one  who  much  or  oft  delight 
To  season  my  fireside  with  personal  talk — 
Of  friends,  who  live  within  an  eas)'^  walk, 
Or  neighbours,  daily,  weekly,  in  my  sight  : 
And,  for  my  chance-acquaintance,  ladies  bright. 
Sons,  mothers,  maidens  withering  on  the  stalk, 
These  all  wear  out  of  me,  like  forms,  with  chalk 
Painted  on  rich  men's  floors,  for  one  feast-night. 

Better  than  such  discourse  doth  silence  long. 
Long,  barren  silence,  square  with  my  desire ; 
To  sit  without  emotion,  hope,  or  aim. 
In  the  loved  presence  of  my  cottage  fire. 
And  listen  to  the  flapping  of  the  flame. 
Or  kettle  whispering  its  faint  undersong. 

With  Wordsworth,  indeed,  the  light  of  revelation 
did  not  fall  upon  human  beings  so  unbrokenly  as  upon 
the  face  of  the  earth.  He  knew  the  birds  of  the 
countryside  better  than  the  old  men,  and  the  flowers 
far  better  than  the  children.  He  noticed  how  light 
plays  like  a  spirit  upon  all  living  things.  He  heard 
every  field  and  valley  echoing  with  new  songs.  He 
saw  the  daffodils  dancing  by  the  lake,  the  green  linnet 
dancing  among  the  hazel  leaves,  and  the  young  lambs 
bounding,  as  he  says  in  an  unexpected  line,  "  as  to 
the  tabor's  sound,"  and  his  heart  danced  to  the  same 
music,  like  the  heart  of  a  mystic  caught  up  in  holy 
rapture.  Here  rather  than  in  meji  did  he  discover  the 
divine  speech.  His  vision  of  men  was  always  troubled 
by  his  consciousness  of  duties.  Nature  came  to  him 
as   a    liberator    into    spiritual   existence.      Not    that   he 

4 


50  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

ceased  to  be  a  philosopher  in  his  reveries.  He  was 
never  the  half-sensual  kind  of  mystic.  He  was  never 
a  sensualist  in  anything,  indeed.  It  is  significant  that 
he  had  little  sense  of  smell — the  most  sensual  of  the 
senses.  It  is^  perhaj^s^  because  of  this  that  he  is  com- 
paratively so  roseless_a_poet.  ^ 

But  whar^iT^ar  he  had,  what  a  harvesting  eye  I 
One  cannot  read  The  Prelude  or  The  Ode  or  Tintern 
Abbey  without  feeling  that  seldom  can  there  have  been 
a  poet  with  a  more  exquisite  capacity  for*  the  enjoyment 
of  joyous  things.  In  his  profounder  moments  he  reaches 
the  very  sources  of  joy,  as  few  poets  have  done.  He 
attracts  many  readers  like  a  prospect  of  cleansing-  and 
healing  streams. 

And  he  succeeds  in  being  a  great  poet  in  two 
manners.  He  is  a  great  poet  in  the  grand  tradition 
of  English  literature,  and  he  is  a  great  poet  ini  his 
revolutionary  simplicity.  The  Idiot  Boy^  for  all  its 
banalities,  is  as  immortal  as  The  Ode,  and  The  Solitary 
Reaper  will  live  side  by  side  with  the  great  sonnets 
while  the  love  of  literature  endures.  Wihile  we  read 
these  poems  we  tell  ourselves  that  it  is  almost  irrelevant 
to  mourn  the  fact  that  the  man  who  wrote  them  gave 
up  his  faith  in  humanity  for  faith  in  Church  and  State. 
His  genius  survives  in  literature  :  it  was  only  his 
courage  as  a  politician  that  perished.  At  the  same 
time,  he  wished  to  impress  himself  upon  the  world  as 
a  politician  even  more  perhaps  than  as  a  poet.  And, 
indeed,  if  he  had  died  at  the  age  at  which  Byron  died, 
his  record  in  politics  would  have  been  as  noble  as  his 
record  in  poetry.  Happily  or  unhappily,  however,  he 
lived  on,  a  worse  politician  and  a  worse  poet.  His 
record  as  both  has  never  before  been  set  forth  with 
the  same  comprehensiveness  as  in  Professor  Harper's 
important  and,  after  one  has  ploughed  through  some 
heavy    pages,    fascinating    volumes. 


WORDSWORTH  51 


2.  His  Politics 

"Just  for  a  handful  of  silver  he  left  us."  Browning 
was  asked  if  he  really  meant  the  figure  in  T/ie  Lost 
Leader  for  Wordsworth,  and  he  admitted  that,  though 
it  was  not  a  portrait,  he  had  Wordsworth  vaguely  in 
his  mind.  We  do  not  nowadays  believe  that  Wordsworth 
changed  his  political  opinions  in  order  to  be  made  dis- 
tributor of  stamps  for  the  county  of  Westmoreland,  or 
even  (as  he  afterwards  became  in  addition)  for  the 
county  of  Cumberland.  Nor  did  Browning  believe  this. 
He  did  believe,  however,  that  Wordsworth  was^a  turn- 
coat,  a  renegade — a  poet  who  began  as  the  champion 
olT  liberty  and  ended  as  its  enemyT"  TEfs  js_the^general 
view,  and  it  seems  to  me  to  be  unassailable. 

Mr,  A.  V.  Dicey,  in  a  recent  book.  The  StatesmansAip 
of    Wordsworth,   attempts   to   portray   W^ordsworth   as    a 
sort   of   early   Mazzini — one   who    "  by    many    years    an- 
ticipated,   thought   out,    and   announced   the    doctrine   of 
Nationalism,    which   during    at    least    fifty    years    of   the 
nineteenth    century    (1820-70)    governed    or    told    upon 
the  foreign  policy  of  every  European  country."     I  think 
he    exaggerates,    but    it   cannot    be    denied   that    Words- 
worth said  many  wise  things  about  nationality,  and  that 
he   showed   a   true   liberal   instinct    in   the   French    wars, 
siding    with    the    French    in    the    early    days    while    they 
were  fighting  for  liberty,  and  afterwards  siding   against 
them  when  they  were  fighting  for  Napoleonic  Imperialism. 
Wordsworth  had  not  yet  abandoned  his  ardour  for  liberty 
when,  in  1809,  he  published  his  Tract  on  the  Convention 
of    C intra.      Those    who    accuse    him    of    apostasy   have 
in  mind  not  his  "  Tract  "  and  his  sonnets  of  war-time, 
but  the  later  lapse  of  faith  which  resulted  in  his  oppos- 
ing   Catholic    Emancipation    and   the    Reform    Bill,    and 
in.  his  sitting  down  seriously  to  write  sonnets  in  favour 
jr,  tj^  capital  punishment. 

^         He  began  with  an  imagination  which  emphasized  the 
natural  goodness  of  man  :    he  ended  with  an  imagination 


52  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

which  emphasized  the  natural  evil  of  man.  He  began 
with  faith  in  liberty  ;  he  ended  with  faith  in  restraint. 
Mr.  Dicey  admits  much  of  the  case  against  the  later 
Wordsworth,  but  his  very  defence  of  the  poet  is  in 
itself  an  accusation.  He  contends,  for  instance,  that 
"  it  was  natural  that  a  man,  who  had  in  his  youth  seen 
face  to  face  the  violence  of  the  revolutionary  struggle 
in  France,  should  have  felt  the  danger  of  the  Reform 
Act  becoming  the  commencement  of  anarchy  and  revolu- 
tion in  England."  Natural  it  may  have  been,  but  none 
the  less  it  was  a  right -about-turn  of  the  spirit.  Words- 
worth had  ceased  to  believe  in  liberty. 

There  is  very  little  evidence,  indeed,  that  in  his  later 
years  Wordsworth  remained  interested  in  liberty  at  all. 
The  most  important  evidence  of  the  kind  is  that  of 
Thomas  Cooper,  the  Chartist,  author  of  The  Purgatory 
of  Suicides,  who  visited  him  in  1846  after  serving  a 
term  in  prison  on  a  charge  of  sedition.  Wordsworth 
received  him  and  said  to  him  :  "  You  Chartists  are 
right  :  you  have  a  right  to  votes,  only  you  take  the 
wrong  way  to  obtain  them.  You  must  avoid  physical 
violence."  Referring  to  the  conversation,  Mr.  Dicey 
comments  : — 

At  the  age  of  seventy-six  the  spirit  of  the  old  revolutionist  and 
of  the  friend  of  the  Girondins  was  still  alive.  He  might  not  think 
much  of  the  Whigs,  but  within  four  years  of  his  death  Wordsworth 
was  certainly  no  Tory. 

There  is  no  reason,  however,  why  we  should  trouble 
our  heads  over  the  question  whether  at  the  age  of 
seventy -six  Wordsworth  was  a  Tory  or  not.  It  is  only 
by  the  grace  of  God  that  any  man  escapes  being  a 
Tory  long  before  that.  Wliat  is  of  interest  to  us  is 
his  attitude  in  the  days  of  his  vitality,  not  of  his  senility. 
In  regard  to  this,  I  agree  that  it  would  be  grossly 
unfair  to  accuse  him  of  apostasy,  simply  because  he 
at  first  hailed  the  French  Revolution  as  the  return  of 
the    Golden    Age— 


WORDSWORTH  53 


Bliss  was  it  in  that  dawn  to  be  alive, 
But  to  be  young  was  very  heaven  ! 

— and  ten  or  fifteen  years  later  was  to  be  found  gloomily 
prophesying  against  a  premature  peace  with  Napoleon. 
One  cannot  be  sure  that,  if  one  had  been  living  in 
those  days  oneself,  one's  faith  in  the  Revolution  would 
have  survived  the  September  massacres  and  Napoleon 
undiminished.  Those  who  had  at  first  believed  that 
the  reign  of  righteousness  had  suddenly  come  down 
from  Heaven  must  have  been  shocked  to  find  that  human 
nature  was  still  red  in  tooth  and  claw  in  the  new  era. 
Not  that  the  massacres  immediately  alienated  Words- 
worth. In  the  year  following  them  he  wrote  in  defence 
of  the  French  Revolution,  and  incidentally  apologized 
for  the  execution  of  King  Louis.  "If  you  had 
attended,"  he  wrote  in  his  unpublished  Apology  for  the 
French  Revolution  in  1793,  "  to  the  history  of  the  French 
Revolution  as  minutely  as  its  importance  demands,  so 
far  from  stopping  to  bewail  his  death,  you  would  rather 
have  regretted  that  the  blind  fondness  of  his  people 
had  placed  a  human  being  in  that  monstrous  situation 
which  rendered  him  unaccountable  before  a  human 
tribunal."  In  The  Prelude,  too  (which,  it  will  be 
remembered,  though  it  was  written  early,  Wordsworth 
left  to  be  published  after  his  death),  we  are  given  a 
perfect  answer  to  those  who  would  condemn  the  French 
Revolution,  or  any  similar  uprising,  on  account  of  its 
incidental   horrors  : — 

When  a  taunt 
Was  taken  up  by  scoffers  in  their  pride. 
Saying,  "  Behold  the  harvest  that  we  reap 
From  popular  government  and  equality," 
I  clearly  saw  that  neither  these  nor  aught 
Of  wild  belief  engrafted  on  their  views 
By  false  philosophy  had  caused  the  woe. 
But  a  terrific  reservoir  of  guilt 
And  ignorance  filled  up  from  age  to  age. 
That  would  no  longer  hold  its  loathsome  charge, 
But  burst  and  spread  in  deluge  through  the  land. 


54  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Mr.  Dicey  insists  that  Wordsworth's  attitude  in  regard 
to  the  horrors  of  September  proves  "  the  statesman- 
hke  calmness  and  firmness  of  his  judgment."  Words- 
worth was  hardly  calm,  but  he  remained  on  the  side 
of  France  with  sufficiently  firm  enthusiasm  to  pray  for 
the  defeat  of  his  own  countrymen  in  the  war  of  1793. 
He  describes,  in  The  Prelude,  how  he  felt  at  the  time 
in  an  English  country  church:  — 

When,  in  the  congregation  bending  all 

To  their  great  Father,  prayers  were  offered  up. 

Or  praises  for  our  country's  victories  ; 

And,  'mid  the  simple  worshippers,  perchance 

I  only,  like  an  uninvited  guest 

Whom  no  one  owned,  sate  silent,  shall  I  add. 

Fed  on  the  day  of  vengeance  3^et  to  come. 

The  faith  that  survived  the  massacres,  however,  could  not 
survive  Napoleon.  Henceforth  Wordsworth  began  to 
write  against  France  in  the  name  of  Nationalism  and 
Liberty. 

He  now  becomes  a  political  thinker — a  great  political 
thinker,  in  the  judgment  of  Mr.  Dicey.  He  sets  forth 
a  political  philosophy — the  philosophy  of  Nationalism. 
He  grasped  the  first  principle  of  Nationalism  firmly, 
which  is,  that  nations  should  be  self-governed,  even 
if  they  are  governed  badly.  He  saw  that  the  nation 
which  is  oppressed  from  within  is  in  a  far  more  hopeful 
condition  than  the  nation  which  is  oppressed  from  without. 
In  his  Tract  he  wrote  : — 

The  difference  between  inbred  oppression  and  that  which  is 
from  without  [i.e.  imposed  by  foreigners]  is  essential ;  inasmuch 
as  the  former  does  not  exclude,  from  the  minds  of  the  people,  the 
feeling  of  being  self-governed  ;  does  not  imply  (as  the  latter  does, 
when  patiently  submitted  to)  an  abandonment  of  the  first  duty 
imposed  by  the  faculty  of  reason. 

And  he  went  on  : — 

If  a  country  have  put  on  chains  of  its  own  forging  ;  in  the  name 
of  xdrtue,  let  it  be  conscious  that  to  itself  it  is  accountable  :    let 


WORDSWORTH  55 


it  not  have  cause  to  look  beyond  its  own  limits  for  reproof :  and 
— in  the  name  of  humanity — if  it  be  self-depressed,  let  it  have  its 
pride  and  some  hope  within  itself.  The  poorest  peasant,  in  an 
unsubdued  land,  feels  this  pride.  I  do  not  appeal  to  the  example 
of  Britain  or  of  Switzerland,  for  the  one  is  free,  and  the  other  lately 
was  free  (and,  I  trust,  will  ere  long  be  so  again)  :  but  talk  with 
the  Swede  ;  and  you  will  see  the  joy  he  finds  in  these  sensations. 
With  him  animal  courage  (the  substitute  for  many  and  the  friend 
of  all  the  manly  virtues)  has  space  to  move  in  :  and  is  at  once 
elevated  by  his  imagination,  and  softened  by  his  affections  :  it  is 
invigorated  also  ;  for  the  whole  courage  of  his  country  is  in  his 
breast. 

That  is  an  admirable  statement  of  the  Liberal  faith. 
Sir  Henry  Campbell-Bannerman  was  putting  the  same 
truth  in  a  sentence  when  he  said  that  good  government 
was  no  substitute  for  self-government.  Wordsworth, 
however,  was  not  an  out-and-out  Nationalist.  He  did 
not  regard  the  principles  of  Nationalism  as  applicable  to 
all  nations  alike,  small  and  great.  He  believed  in  the 
"  balance  of  power,"  in  which  "  the  smaller  states  must 
disappear,  and  merge  in  the  large  nations  of  widespread 
language."  He  desired  national  unity  for  Germany  and 
for  Italy  (which  was  in  accordance  with  the  principles 
of  Nationalism),  but  he  also  blessed  the  union  of  Ireland 
with  Great  Britain  (which  was  a  violation  of  the  principles 
of  Nationalism).  He  introduced  "  certain  limitations," 
indeed,  into  the  Nationalist  creed,  which  enable  even 
an  Imperialist  like  Mr.  Dicey  to  look  like  a  kind  of 
Nationalist. 

At  the  same  time,  though  he  acquiesced  in  the  dis- 
honour of  the  Irish  Union,  his  patriotism  never  became 
perverted  into  Jingoism.  ,He  regarded  the  war  between 
England  and  France,  not  as  a  war  between  angel  and 
devil,  but  as  a  war  between  one  sinner  doing  his  best 
and  another  sinner  doing  his  worst.  He  was  gloomy 
as  a  Hebrew  prophet  in  his  summoning  of  England 
to  a  change  of  heart  in  a  sonnet  written  in    1803  : — 

England  !  the  time  is  come  when  thou  shouldst  wean 
Thy  heart  from  its  emasculating  food  ; 


56  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

The  truth  should  now  be  better  understood  ; 

Old  things  have  been  unsettled  ;  we  have  seen 

Fair  seed-time,  better  harvest  might  have  been 

But  for  thy  trespasses  ;  and,  at  this  day. 

If  for  Greece,  Egypt,   India,  Africa, 

Aught  good  were  destined,  thou  wouldst  step  between. 

England  !   all  nations  in  this  charge  agree  : 

But  worse,  more  ignorant  in  love  and  hate. 

Far,  far  more  abject  is  thine  Enemy  : 

Therefore  the  wise  pray  for  thee,  though  the  freight 

Of  thy  offences  be  a  heavy  weight : 

Oh  grief,  that  Earth's  best  hopes  rest  all  with  Thee  1 

All  this  means  merely  that  the  older  Wordsworth 
grew,  the  more  he  became  concerned  with  the  duties 
rather  than  the  rights  of  man.  The  revolutionary  creed 
seems  at  times  to  involve  the  belief  that,  if  you  give 
men  their  rights,  they  will  perform  their  duties  as  a 
necessary  consequence.  The  Conservative  creed,  on  the 
other  hand,  appears  to  be  based  on  the  theory  that 
men,  as  a  whole,  are  scarcely  fit  for  rights  but 
must  be  kept  to  their  duties  with  a  strong  hand. 
Neither  belief  is  entirely  true.  As  Mazzini  saw, 
the  French  Revolution  failed  because  it  emphasized 
the  rights  so  disproportionately  in  comparison  with  the 
duties  of  man.  Conservatism  fails,  on  the  other  hand, 
because  its  conception  of  duty  inevitably  ceases  before 
long  to  be  an  ethical  conception  :  duty  in  the  mouth  of 
reactionaries  usually  means  simply  obedience  to  one's 
"  betters."  The  melancholy  sort  of  morahst  frequently 
hardens  into  a  reactionary  of  this  sort.  Burke  and 
Carlyle  and  Ruskin — all  of  them  blasphemed  the  spirit 
of  liberty  in  the  name  of  duty.  Mr.  Dicey  contends 
that  Burke's  and  Wordsworth's  political  principles  re- 
mained essentially  consistent  throughout.  They  assuredly 
did  nothing  of  the  sort.  Burke's  principles  during  the 
American  War  and  his  principles  at  the  time  of  the 
French  Revolution  were  divided  from  each  other  like 
crabbed  age  and  youth.  Burke  lost  his  beliefs  as  he 
did  his  youth.     And  so  did  Wordsworth.      It  seems  tQ 


WORDSWORTH  57 


me  rather  a  waste  of  time  to  insist  at  'all  costs  on  the 
consistency  of  great  men.  The  great  question  is,  not 
whether  they  were  consistent,  but  when  they  were  right. 
Wordsworth  was  in  the  main  right  in  his  enthusiasm 
for  the  French  Revolution,  and  he  was  in  the  main 
right  in  his  hatred  of  Napoleonism.  But,  when  once 
the  Napoleonic  Wars  were  over,  he  had  no  creed  left 
for  mankind.  He  lived  on  till  1850,  but  he  ceased  to  be 
able  to  say  anything  that  had  the  ancient  inspiration. 
He  was  at  his  greatest  an  inspired  child  of  the 
Revolution.  He  learned  from  France  that  love  of  liberty 
which  afterwards  led  him  to  oppose  France.  Speak- 
ing of  those  who,  like  himself,  had  changed  in  their 
feelings  towards  France,  he  wrote  : — 

Though  there  was  a  shifting  in  temper  of  hostility  in  their  minds 
as  far  as  regarded  persons,  they  only  combated  the  same  enemy 
opposed  to  them  under  a  different  shape  ;  and  that  enemy  was 
the  spirit  of  selfish  tyranny  and  lawless  ambition. 

That  is  a  just  defence.  But  the  undeniable  fact  is  that, 
after  that  time,  Wordsworth  ceased  to  combat  the  spirit 
of  selfish  tyranny  and  lawless  ambition  as  he  once  had 
done.  There  is  no  need  to  blame  him  :  also  there  is  no 
need  to  defend  him.  He  was  human  ;  he  was  tired  ;  he 
was  growing  old.  The  chief  danger  of  a  book  like  Mr. 
Dicey 's  is  that,  in  accepting  its  defence  of  Wordsworth's 
maturity,  we  may  come  to  disparage  his  splendid  youth. 
Mr.  Dicey's  book,  however,  is  exceedingly  interesting 
in  calling  attention  to  the  great  part  politics  may  play 
in  the  life  of  a  poet.  Wordsworth  said,  in  1833,  that 
"  although  he  was  known  to  the  world  only  as  a  poet, 
he  had  given  twelve  hours'  thought  to  the  condition 
and  prospects  of  society,  for  one  to  poetry."  He  did 
not  retire  into  a  "  wise  passiveness  "  as  regards  the 
world's  affairs  until  he  had  written  some  of  the  greatest 
political  literature — and,  in  saying  this,  I  am  thinking 
of  his  sonnets  rather  than  of  his  political  prose— that 
has  appeared  in  England  since   the  death  of  Miltoa, 


Y 
KEATS 

1.  The  Biography 

Sir  Sidney  Colvin  deserves  praise  for  the  noble 
architecture  df  the  temple  he  has  built  in  honour  of 
Keats.  His  great  book,  John  Keats:  His  Life  and 
Poetry;  His  Friends,  Critics,  and  After -fame,  is  not 
only  a  temple,  indeed,  but  a  museum.  Sir  Sidney  has 
brought  together  here  the  whole  of  Keats's  world,  or  at 
least  all  the  relics  of  his  world  that  the  last  of'  a  band 
of  great  collectors  has  been  able  to  recover  ;  and  in 
the  result  we  can  accompany  Keats  through  the  glad 
and  sad  and  mad  and  bad  hours  of  his  short  and 
marvellous  life  as  we  have  never  been  able  to  do 
before  under  the  guidance  of  a  single  biographer.  We 
are  still  left  in  the  dark,  it  is  true,  as  to,  Keats's  race 
and  descent.  Whether  Keats's  father  came  to  London 
from  Cornwall  or  not.  Sir  Sidney  has  not  been  able  to 
decide  on  the  rather  shaky  evidence  that  has  been 
put  forward.  If  it  should  hereafter  turn  out  that  Keats 
-was  a  Cornishman  at  one  remove,  Matthew  Arnold's 
conjecture  as  to  the  "  Celtic  element  "  in  him,  as  in 
other  English  poets,  may  revive  in  the  general  esteem. 
In  the  present  state  of  our  knowledge,  however,  we 
must  be  content  to  accept  Keats  as  a  Londoner  without 
ancestors  beyond  the  father  who  was  head-ostler  at 
the  sign  of  the  "  Swan  and  Hoop,"  Finsbury  Pavement, 
and  married  his  master's  daughter.  It  was  at  the  stable 
at  the  "  Swan  and  Hoop  "—not  a  public-house,  by  the 
way,  but  a  livery-stable— that  Keats  was  prematurely 
born   at   the   end   of   October    1795.      He  was  scarcely 


KEATS  59 


nine  years  old  when  his  father  was  killed  by  a  fall 
from  a  horse.  He  was  only  fourteen  when  his  mother 
(who  had  re-married  unhappily  and  then  been  separated' 
from  her  husband)  died,  a  victim  of  chronic  rheumatism 
and  consumption.  It  is  from  his  mother  that  Keats 
seems  to  have  inherited  his  impetuous  and  passionate 
nature.  There  is  the  evidence  oif  a  certain  wholesale 
tea-dealer — the  respectability  of  whose  trade  may  have 
inclined  him  to  censoriousness — to  the  effect  that,  both 
as  girl  and  woman,  she  "  was  a  person  of  unbridled 
temperament,  and  that  in  her  later  years  she  fell  into 
loose  ways,  and  was  no  credit  to  the  family."  That 
she  had  other  qualities  besides  those  mentioned  by 
the  tea-dealer  is  shown  by  the  passionate  affection  that 
existed  between  her  and  her  son  John.  "  Once  as  a 
young  child,  when  she  was  ordered  to  be  kept  quiet 
during  an  illness,  he  is  said  to  have  insisted  on  keeping 
watch  at  her  door  with  an  old  sword,  and  allowing 
no  one  to  go  in."  As  she  lay  dying,  "  he  sat  up  whole 
nights  with  her  in  a  great  chair,  would  suffer  nobody 
to  give  her  medicine,  or  even  cook  her  food,  but  himself, 
and  read  novels  to  her  in  her  intervals  of  ease."  The 
Keats  children  were  fortunately  not  left  penniless. 
Their  grandfather,  the  proprietor  of  the  livery-stable, 
had  bequeathed  a  fortune  of  £13,000,  a  little  of  which 
was  spent  on  sending  Keats  to  a  good  school  till  the 
age  of  sixteen,  and  afterwards  enabled  him  to  attend 
Guy's  Hospital  as  a  medical  student. 

It  is  almost  impossible  to  credit  the  accepted  story 
that  he  passed  all  his  boyhood  without  making  any, 
attempt  at  writmg  poetry.  "  He  did  not  begin  to 
write,"  says  Sir  Sidney  Colvm,  "  till  he  was  near 
eighteen."  If  this  is  so,  one  feels  all  the  more  grateful 
to  his  old  schoolfellow,  Cowden  Clarke,  who  lent  him 
The  Faery  Queene,  with  a  long  list  of  other  books, 
and  in  doing  so  presented  him  with  the  key  that 
unlocked  the  unsuspected  treasure  of  his  genius.  There 
is  only  one  person,   indeed,   in  all  the  Keats  circle  t;o 


60  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

whom  one  is  more  passionately  grateful  than  to  Cowden 
Clarke:  that  is  Fanny  Brawne.  Keats  no  doubt 
had  laboured  to  some  purpose — occasionally,  to  fine 
purpose — with  his  genius  before  the  autumn  of  1 8 1 8, 
when  he  met  Fanny  Brawne  for  the  first  time.  None 
the  less,  had  he  died  before  that  date,  he  would  have 
been  remembered  in  literature  not  as  a  marvellous 
original  artist,  but  rather  as  one  of  those  "  inheritors 
of  unfulfilled  renown  "  among  whom  Shelley  surprisingly 
placed  him.  Fanny  Brawne  may  (or  may  not)  have 
been  the  bad  fairy  of  Keats  as  a  man.  She  was 
unquestionably  his  good  fairy  as  a  poet. 

This  is  the  only  matter  upon  which  one  is  seriously 
disposed  to  quarrel  with  Sir  Sidney  Colvin  as  a 
biographer.  He  does  not  emphasize  as  he  ought  the 
debt  we  are  under  to  Fanny  Brawne  as  the  intensifier 
of  Keats's  genius— the  "  minx,"  as  Keats  irritably  called 
her,  who  transformed  him  in  a  few  months  from  a 
poet  of  still  doubtful  fame  into  a  master  and  an 
immortal.  The  attachment.  Sir  Sidney  thinks,  was  a 
misfortune  for  him,  though  he  qualifies  this  by  adding 
that  "  so  probably  under  the  circumstances  must  any 
passion  for  a  woman  have  been."  Well,  let  us  test 
this  "  misfortune  "  by  its  consequences.  The  meeting 
with  Fanny  took  place,  as  I  have  said,  in  the  autumn 
of  i8i8.  During  the  winter  Keats  continued  to  write 
Hyperion,  which  he  seems  already  to  have  begun.  In 
January  1819  he  wrote  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes.  During 
the  spring  of  that  year,  he  wrote  the  Ode  to  Psyche, 
the  Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn,  the  Ode  to  a  Nightingale, 
and  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci.  In  the  autumn  he 
finished  Lamia,  and  wrote  the  Ode  to  Autumn.  To  the 
same  year  belongs  the  second  greatest  of  his  sonnets. 
Bright  star,  would  I  were  steadfast  as  thou  art.  In 
other  words,  practically  all  the  fine  gold  of  Keats's  work' 
was  produced  in  the  months  in  which  his  passion  for 
Fanny  Brawne  was  consuming  him  as  with  fire.  His 
greatest  poems  we  clearly  owe  to  that  heightened  sense 


KEATS  61 


of  beauty  which  resulted  from  his  translation  into  a 
lover.  It  seems  to  me  a  treachery  to  Keats's  memory 
to  belittle  a  woman  who  was  at  least  the  occasion  of 
such  a  passionate  expenditure  of  genius.  Sir  Sidney 
Colvin  does  his  best  to  be  fair  to  Fanny,  but  his 
presentation  of  the  story  of  Keats's  love  for  her  will, 
I  am  afraid,  be  regarded  by  the  long  line  of  her 
disparagers  as  an  endorsement  of  their  blame. 

I  can  understand  the  dislike  of  Fanny  Brawne  on 
the  part  of  those  who  dislike  Keats  and  all  his  works. 
But  if  we  accept  Keats  and  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes, 
we  had  better  be  honest  and  also  accept  Fanny,  who 
inspired  them.  Keats,  it  must  be  remembered,  was 
a  sensualist.  His  poems  belong  to  the  literature  of 
the  higher  sensualism.  They  reveal  him  as  a  man 
not  altogether  free  from  the  vulgarities  of  sensualism, 
as  well  as  one  who  was  able  to  transmute  it  into  perfect 
literature.  He  seems  to  have  admired  women  vulgarly 
as  creatures  whose  hands  were  waiting  to  be  squeezed, 
rather  than  as  equal  human  beings  ;  the  eminent  excep- 
tion to  this  being  his  sister-in-law,  Georgiana.  His 
famous  declaration  of  independence  of  them — that  he 
would  rather  give  them  a  sugar-plum  than  his  time — 
was  essentially  a  cynicism  in  the  exhausted-Don-Juan 
mood.  Hence,  Keats  was  almost  doomed  to  fall  in 
love  with  provocation  rather  than  with  what  the 
Victorians  called  "  soul."  His  destiny  was  not  to  be 
a  happy  lover,  but  the  slave  of  a  "  minx."  It  was  not 
a  slavery  without  dignity,  however.  It  had  the  dignity 
of  tragedy.  Sir  Sidney  Colvin  regrets  that  the  love- 
letters  of  Keats  to  Fanny  were  ever  published.  It 
would  be  as  reasonable,  in  my  opinion,  to  regret  the 
publication  of  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci.  La  Bella 
Dame  sans  Merci  says  in  literature  merely  what 
the  love-letters  say  in  autobiography.  The  love- 
letters,  indeed,  like  the  poem,  affect  us  as  great 
literature  does.  They  unquestionably  take  us  down 
into    the    depths    of    suffering — those    depths    in    which 


62  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

tortured  souls  cry  out  almost  inarticulately  in  their 
anguish.  The  torture  of  the  dying  lover,  as  he  sails 
for  Italy  and  leaves  Fanny,  never  to  see  her  again, 
has  almost  no  counterpart  in  biographical  literature. 
'*  The  thought  of  leaving  Miss  Brawne,"  he  writes  to 
Brown  from  Yarmouth,  "  is  beyond  everything  horrible 
— the  sense  of  darkness  coming  over  me — I  eternally 
see  her  figure  eternally  vanishing."  And  when  he 
reaches  Naples  he  writes  to  the  same  friend  : — 

I  can  bear  to  die — I  cannot  bear  to  leave  her.  O  God  !  God  ! 
God  !  Everything  that  I  have  in  my  trunks  that  reminds  me  of 
her  goes  through  me  Uke  a  spear.  The  silk  lining  she  put  in  my 
travelling  cap  scalds  my  head.  My  imagination  is  horribly  vivid 
about  her — I  see  her — I  hear  her.  .  .  .  O  that  I  could  be  buried 
near  where  she  lives  !  I  am  afraid  to  write  to  her — to  receive  a 
letter  from  her.  To  see  her  handwriting  would  break  my  heart 
— even  to  hear  of  her  anyhow,  to  see  her  name  written,  would 
be  more  than  I  can  bear. 

Sir  Sidney  Oolvin  does  not  attempt  to  hide  Keats's 
love-story  away  in  a  corner.  Wlhere  he  goes  wrong, 
it  seems  to  me,  is  in  his  failure  to  realize  that  this 
love-story  was  the  making  of  Keats  as  a  man  of  genius. 
Had  Sir  Sidney  fully  grasped  the  part  played  by  Fanny 
Brawne  as,  for  good  or  evil,  the  presiding  genius  of 
Keats  as  a  poet,  he  would,  I  fancy,  have  found  a 
different  explanation  of  the  changes  introduced  into 
the  later  version  of  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Aierci.  Sir 
Sidney  is  all  in  favour — and  there  is  something  to  be 
said  for  his  preference — of'  the  earlier  version,  which 
begins  : — 

O  what  can  ail  thee,  knight-at-arms. 
Alone  and  palely  loitering  ! 

But  he  does  not  perceive  the  reasons  that  led  Keats 
to  alter  this  in  the  version  he  published  in  Leigh  Hunt's 
Indicator   to  : — 

Ah,  what  can  ail  thee,  wretched  wight. 


KEATS  63 


and  so  on.  Sir  Sidney  thinks  that  this  and  other 
changes,  "  which  are  all  in  the  direction  of  the  slipshod 
and  the  commonplace,  were  made  on  Hunt's  suggestion, 
and  that  Keats  acquiesced  from  fatigue  or  indifference." 
To  accuse  Hunt  of  wishing  to  alter  "  knight-at-arms  " 
to  "  wretched  wight  "  seems  to  me  unwarrantable 
guessing.  Surely  a  much  more  likely  explanation  is 
that  Keats,  who  in  this  poem  wrote  his  own  biography 
as  an  unfortunate  lover,  came  in  a  realistic  mood  to 
dislike  '*  knight-at-arms  "  as  a  too  romantic  image  of 
himself.  He  decided,  I  conjecture,  that  "  wretched 
wight  "  was  a  description  nearer  the  bitter  truth.  Hence 
his  emendation.  The  other  alterations  also  seem  to 
me  to  belong  to  Keats  rather  than  to  Hunt.  This  does 
not  mean  that  the  "  knight-at-arms  "  version  is  not 
also  beautiful.  But,  in  spite  of  this,  I  trust  the 
Delegates  of  the  Oxford  University  Press  will  not  listen 
to  Sir  Sidney  Colvin's  appeal  to  banish  the  later  version 
from  their  editions  of  Keats.  Every  edition  of  Keats 
ought  to  contain  both  versions  just  as  it  ought  to 
contain  both  versions  of  Hyperion. 

Nothing  that  I  have  written  will  be  regarded,  I 
trust,  as  depreciating  the  essential  excellence,  power, 
and  (in  its  scholarly  way)  even  the  greatness  of  Sir 
Sidney  Colvin's  book.  But  a  certain  false  emphasis 
here  and  there,  an  intelligible  prejudice  in  favour  of 
believing  what  is  good  of  his  subject,  has  left  his  book 
almost  too  ready  to  the  hand  of  those  who  cannot 
love  a  man  of  genius  without  desiring  to  "  respect- 
abilize  "  him.  Sir  Sidney  sees  clearly  enough  the  double 
nature  of  Keats — his  fiery  courage,  shown  in  his  love 
of  fighting  as  a  schoolboy,  his  generosity,  his  virtue  of 
the  heart,  on  the  one  hand,  and  his  luxurious  love  of 
beauty,  his  tremulous  and  swooning  sensitiveness  in  the 
presence  of  nature  and  women,  his  morbidness,  his 
mawkishness,  his  fascination  as  by  serpents,  on  the 
other.  But  in  the  resultant  portrait,  it  is  a  too 
respectable  and  virile  Keats  that  emerges.     Keats  was 


64.  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

more  virile  as  a  man  than  is  generally  understood.  He 
does  not  owe  his  immortality  to  his  virility,  however. 
He  owes  it  to  his  servitude  to  golden  images,  to  his 
citizenship  of  the  world  of  the  senses,  to  his  bondage  to 
physical  love.  Had  he  lived  longer  he  might  have 
invaded  other  worlds.  His  recasting  of  Hyperion 
opens  with  a  cry  of  distrust  in  the  artist  who  is  content 
to  live  in  the  little  world  of  his  art.  His  very  revulsion 
against  the  English  of  Milton  was  a  revulsion  against 
the  dead  language  of  formal  beauty.  But  it  is  in 
formal  beauty — the  formal  beauty  especially  of  the  Ode 
on  a  Grecian  Urn,  which  has  never  been  surpassed  in 
literature — that  his  own  achievement  lies.  He  is  great 
among  the  pagans,  not  among  the  prophets.  Unless 
we  keep  this  clearly  in  mind  our  praise  of  him  will 
not  be  appreciation.  It  will  be  but  a  sounding  funeral 
speech  instead  of  communion  with  a  lovely  and  broken 
spirit,  the  greatest  boast  of  whose  life  was  :  "  I  have 
loved  the  principle  of  beauty  in  all  things." 

2.  The  Matthew  Arnold  View 

Matthew  Arnold  has  often  been  attacked  for  his 
essay  on  Shelley.  His  essay  on  Keats,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  is  much  less  sympathetic  and  penetrating.  Here, 
more  than  anywhere  else  in  his  work,  he  seems  to  be 
a  professor  with  whiskers  drinking  afternoon  tea  and 
discoursing  on  literature  to  a  circle  of  schoolgirls.  It 
is  not  that  Matthew  Arnold  under-estimated  Keats. 
'*  He  is  with  Shakespeare,"  he  declared  ;  and  in  another 
sentence  :  "  In  what  we  call  natural  magic,  he  ranks 
with  Shakespeare."  One  may  disagree  Avith  this — for 
in  natural  magic  Keats  does  not  rank  even  with  Shelley 
— and,  at  the  same  time,  feel  that  Matthew  Arnold 
gives  Keats  too  little  rather  than  too  much  appreciation. 
He  divorced  Keats's  poetry  too  gingerly  from  Keats's 
life.  He  did  not  sufficiently  realize  the  need  for  under- 
standing all  that  passion  and  courage  and  railing  and 


KEATS  65 


ecstasy  of  which  the  poems  are  the  expression.  He 
was  a  Httle  shocked  ;  he  would  have  hked  to  draw 
a  veil  ;  he  did  not  approve  of  a  young  man  who  could 
make  love  in  language  so  unhke  the  measured  ardour 
of  one  of  Miss  Austen's  heroes.  The  impression  left  by 
the  letters  to  Fanny  Brawne,  he  declared,  was  "  un- 
pleasing."  After  quoting  one  of  the  letters,  he  goes  on 
to  comment  : — 

One  is  tempted  to  say  that  Keats's  love-letter  is  the  love-letter 
of  a  surgeon's  apprentice.  It  has  in  its  relaxed  self-abandonment 
something  underbred  and  ignoble,  as  of  a  youth  ill  brought  up, 
without  the  training  which  teaches  us  that  we  must  put  some 
constraint  upon  our  feelings  and  upon  the  expression  of  them. 
It  is  the  sort  of  love-letter  of  a  surgeon's  apprentice,  which  one 
might  hear  read  out  in  a  breach  of  promise  case,  or  in  the  Divorce 
Court. 

Applied  to  the  letter  which  Arnold  had  just  quoted 
there  could  not  be  a  more  foolish  criticism.  Keats 
was  dogged  by  a  curious  vulgarity  (which  produced 
occasional  comic  effects  in  his  work),  but  his  self- 
abandonhient  was  not  vulgar.  It  may  have  been  in 
a  sense  immoral  :  he  was  an  artist  who  practised  the 
philosophy  of  exquisite  moments  long  before  Pater  wrote 
about  it.  He  abandoned  himself  to  the  sensations  of 
love  and  the  sensations  of  an  artist  like  a  voluptuary. 
The  best  of  his  work  is  day-dreams  of  love  and  art. 
The  degree  to  which  his  genius  fed  itself  upon  art 
and  day-dreams  of  art  is  suggested  by  the  fact  that 
the  most  perfect  of  his  early  poems,  written  at  the 
age  of  twenty,  was  the  sonnet  on  Chapman's  Homer, 
and  that  the  most  perfect  of  his  later  poems  was  the 
Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn.  His  magic  was  largely  artistic 
magic,  not  natural  magic.  He  writes  about  Pan  and 
the  nymphs,  but  we  do  not  feel  that  they  were  shapes 
of  earth  and  air  to  him,  as  they  were  to  Shelley  ;  rather 
they  seem  like  figures  copied  out  of  his  friends'  pictures. 
Consider,  for  example,  the  picture  of  a  nymph  who 
appeared    to    Endymion :  — 

5 


66  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

It  was  a  nymph  uprising  to  the  breast 

In  the  fountain's  pebbly  margin,  and  she  stood 

'Mong  Hhes,  hke  the  youngest  of  her  brood. 

To  him  her  dripping  hand  she  softly  kist. 

And  anxiously  began  to  plait  and  twist 

Her  ringlets  round  her  fingers. 

The  gestures  of  the  nymph  are  as  ludicrous  as  could 
be  found  in  an  Academy  or  Salon  picture.  Keats's 
human  or  quasi-human  beings  are  seldom  more  than 
decorations,  but  this  is  a  commonplace  decoration.  The 
figures  in  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  and  the  later  narra- 
tives are  a  part  of  the  general  beauty  of  the  poems  ; 
but  even  there  they  are  made,  as  it  were,  to  match 
the  furniture.  It  is  the  same  in  all  his  best  poems, 
Keats's  imagination  lived  in  castles,  and  he  loved  the 
properties,  and  the  men  and  women  were  among  the 
properties.  ,We  may  forget  the  names  of  Porphyro  and 
Madeline,  but  we  do  not  forget  the  background  of 
casement  and  arras  and  golden  dishes  and  beautiful 
sensual  things  against  which  we  see  them,  charming! 
figures  of  love-sickness.  Similarly,  in  Lamia,  we  may 
remember  the  name  of  the  serpent-woman's  lover  with 
difficulty  ;  but  who  can  forget  the  colours  of  her 
serpent-skin  or  the  furnishing  of  her  couch  and  of  her 
palace  in  Corinth  : — 

That  purple-lined  palace  of  sweet  sin  ? 

In  Keats  every  palace  has  a  purple  lining. 

So  much  may  be  said  in  definition  of  Keats's  genius. 
It  was  essentially  an  assthetic  genius.  It  anticipated 
both  William  Morris  and  Oscar  Wilde.  There  is  in 
Keats  a  passion  for  the  luxury  of  the  world  such  as 
we  do  not  find  in  Wordsworth  or  Shelley.  He  had 
not  that  bird-like  quality  of  song  wKich  they  had — 
that  happiness  to  be  alive  and  singing  between  the  sky 
and  the  green  earth.  He  looked  on  beautiful  things  with 
the  intense  devotion  of  the  temple-worshipper  rather 
than  with  the  winged  pleasure  of  the  great  poets.     He 


KEATS  67 


was  love-sick  for  beauty  as  Porphyro  for  Madeline. 
His  attitude  to  beauty — the  secret  and  immortal  beauty 
— is  one  of  "  love  shackled  with  vain-loving."  It  is 
desire  of  an  almost  bodily  kind.  KJeats's  work,  indeed, 
is  in  large  measure  simply  the  beautiful  expression  of 
bodily  desire,  or  of  something  of  the  same  nature  as 
bodily  desire.  His  conception  of  love  was  almost 
entirely  physical.  He  was  greedy  for  it  to  the  point 
of  green-sickness.  His  intuition  told  him  that  passion 
so  entirely  physical  had  in  it  something  fatal.  Love 
in  his  poems  is  poisonous  and  secret  in  its  beauty.  It 
is  passion  for  a  Lamia,  for  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci. 
Keats 's  ecstasies  were  swooning  ecstasies.  They  lacked 
joy.  It  is  not  only  in  the  Ode  to  a  Nightingale  that 
he  seems  to  praise  death  more  than  life.  This  was 
temperamental  with  him.  He  felt  the  "  cursed  spite  " 
of  things  as  melancholily  as  Hamlet  did.  He  was  able 
to  dream  a  world  nearer  his  happiness  than  this 
world  of  dependence  and  church  bells  and  "  literary 
jabberers  "  ;  and  he  could  come  to  no  terms  except 
with  his  fancy.  I  do  not  mean  to  suggest  that  hie 
despised  the  beauty  of  the  earth.  Rather  he  filled  his 
eyes  with  it  : — 

Hill-flowers  running  wild 
In  pink  and  purple  chequer — 

and  : — 

Up-pil'd, 
The  cloudy  rack  slow  journeying  in  the  West, 
Like  herded  elephants. 

But  the  simple  pleasure  in  colours  and  shapes  grows 
I  less  in  his  later  poems.  It  becomes  overcast.  His 
:  great  poems  have  the  intensity  and  sorrow  of  a 
I    farewell. 

It  would  be  absurd,  however,  to  paint  Keats  as 
a  man  without  vitality,  without  pugnacity,  without 
merriment.  His  brother  declared  that  "  John  was  the 
very  soul  of  manliness  and  courage,  and  as  much  like; 


68  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

the  Holy  Ghost  as  Johnny  Keats  " — the  Johnny  Keats 
who  had  allowed  himself  to  be  "  snuffed  out  by  an 
article."  As  a  schoolboy  he  had  been  fond  of  fighting, 
and  as  a  man  he  had  his  share  of  militancy.  He 
had  a  quite  healthy  sense  of  humour,  too — not  a  subtle 
sense,  but  at  least  sufficient  to  enable  him  to  regard 
his  work  playfully  at  times,  as  when  he  commented 
on  an  early  version  of  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci 
containing  the  lines  : — 


^£5 


And  there  I  shut  her  wild,  wild  eyes 
With  kisses  four. 

"  Why  four  kisses?  "  he  writes  to  his  brother  : — 

Why  four  kisses — you  will  say — why  four  ?  Because  I  wish 
to  restrain  the  headlong  impetuosity  of  my  Muse — she  would  have 
fain  said  "  score  "  without  hurting  the  rhyme — but  we  must  temper 
the  imagination,  as  the  critics  say,  with  judgment.  I  was  obliged 
to  choose  an  even  number,  that  both  eyes  might  have  fair  play, 
and  to  speak  truly  I  think  two  apiece  quite  sufficient.  Suppose 
I  had  said  seven,  there  would  have  been  three  and-a-half  apiece 
— a  very  awkward  affair,  and  well  got  out  of  on  my  side. 

That  was  written  nearly  a  year  after  the  famous 
Quarterly  article  on  Endymion,  in  which  the  reviewer 
had  so  severely  taken  to  task  "  Mr.  Keats  (if  that 
be  his  real  name,  for  we  almost  doubt  that  any  man 
in  his  senses  would  put  his  real  name  to  such  a 
rhapsody)."  It  suggests  that  Keats  retained  at  least 
a  certain  share  of  good  spirits,  in  spite  of  the  Quarterly 
and  Fanny  Brawne  and  the  approach  of  death.  His 
observation,  too,  was  often  that  of  a  spirited  common- 
sense  realist  rather  than  an  aesthete,  as  in  his  first 
description   of   Fanny  Brawne  : — 

She  is  about  my  height — with  a  fine  style  and  countenance  of 
the  lengthened  sort — she  wants  sentiment  in  every  feature— she 
manages  to  make  her  hair  look  well— her  nostrils  are  fine— though 
a  little  painful — her  mouth  is  bad  and  good — her  profile  is  better 
than  her  full  face,  which,  indeed,  is  not  full  but  pale  and  thin, 
without  showing  any  bone — her  shape  is  very  graceful,   and   so 


KEATS  69 


are  her  movements — her  arms  are  good,  her  liands  bad-ish — her 
feet  tolerable — she  is  not  seventeen  [nineteen  ?] — but  she  is  ignorant 
— monstrous  in  her  behaviour,  flying  out  in  all  directions,  calhng 
people  such  names — that  I  was  forced  lately  to  make  use  of  the 
term  minx ;  this  is,  I  think,  not  from  any  innate  vice  but  from  a 
penchant  she  has  of  acting  styhshly.  I  am,  however,  tired  of 
such  style,  and  shall  decline  any  more  of  it. 

Yet  before  many  months  he  was  Avriting  to  the  "  minx," 
"  I  will  imagine  you  Venus  to-night,  and  pray,  pray, 
pray,  pray  to  your  star  like  a  heathen."  Certain  it 
is,  as  I  have  already  said,  that  it  was  after  his  meeting 
with  Fanny  Brawne  that  he  grew^,  as  in  a  night,  into 
a  great  poet.  Let  us  not  then  abuse  Keats's  passion 
for  her  as  vulgar.  And  let  us  not  attempt  to  make 
up  for  this  by  ranking  him  with  Shakespeare.  He 
is  great  among  the  second,  not  among  the  first  poets. 


VI 
HENRY   JAMES 

1.  The  Novelist  of  Grains  and  Scruples 

Henry  James  is  an  example  of  a  writer  who  enjoyed 
immense  fame  but  little  popularity.  Some  of  his  best 
books,  I  believe,  never  passed  into  second  editions.  He 
was,  above  all  novelists,  an  esoteric  author.  His  disciples 
had  the  pleasure  of  feehng  like  persons  initiated  into 
mysteries.  He  was  subject,  like  a  rehgious  teacher, 
to  all  kinds  of  conflicting  interpretations.  He  puzzled 
and  exasperated  even  intelligent  people.  They  often 
wondered  what  he  meant  and  whether  it  was  worth 
writing  about.  Mr.  Wells,  or  whoever  wrote  Boon, 
compared  him  to  a  hippopotamus  picking  up  a  pea. 

Certainly  he  laboured  over  trifles  as  though  he  were 
trying  to  pile  Pelion  on  Ossa.  He  was  capable,  had 
he  been  a  poet,  of  writing  an  epic  made  up  of  incidents 
chosen  from  the  gossip  of  an  old  maid  in  the  upper 
middle  classes.  He  was  the  novelist  of  grains  and 
scruples.  I  have  heard  it  urged  that  he  was  the  supreme 
incarnation  of  the  Nonconformist  conscience,  perpetually 
concerned  with  infinitesimal  details  of  conduct.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  there  was  much  more  of  the  aesthete 
in  him  than  of  the  Nonconformist.  He  lived  for  his 
tastes.  It  is  because  he  is  a  novelist  of  tastes  rather 
than  of  passions  that  he  is  unlikely  ever  to  be  popular 
even  to  the  degree  to,  which  Meredith  is  popular. 

One  imagines  him,  from  his  childhood,  as  a  perfect 
connoisseur,  a  dilettante.  He  has  told  us  how,  as  a 
child,   in    New   York,    Paris,    London,    and    Geneva,   he 

70 


HENRY  JAMES  71 

enjoyed  more  than  anything  else  the  "  far  from  showy 
practice  of  wondering  and  dawdhng  and  gaping."  And, 
while  giving  us  this  picture  of  the  small  boy  that  was 
himself,  he  comments : 

There  was  the  very  pattern  and  measure  of  all  he  was  to 
demand:  just  to  be  somewhere — almost  anywhere  would  do — and 
somehow  receive  an  impression  or  an  accession,  feel  a  relation  or 
a  vibration. 

That  is  the  essential  Henry  James — the  collector  of 
impressions  and  vibrations.  "  Almost  anywhere  would 
do  " :  that  is  what  makes  some  of  his  stories  just  miss 
being  as  insipid  as  the  verse  in  a  magazine.  On  the  other 
hand,  of  few  of  his  stories *is  this  true.  His  personality 
was  too  definitely  marked  to  leave  any  of  his  work 
flavourless.  His  work  reflects  him  as  the  arrangement 
of  a  room  may  reflect  a  charming  lady.  He  brings 
into  every  little  world  that  he  enters  the  light  of  a 
new  and  refined  inquisitiveness.  He  is  as  watchful  as 
a  cat.  Half  his  pleasure  seems  to  come  from  waiting 
for  the  extraordinary  to  peep  and  peer  out  of  the 
ordinary.  That  is  his  adventure.  He  prefers  it  to 
seas  of  bloodshed.  One  may  quarrel  with  it,  if  one 
demands  that  art  shall  be  as  violent  as  war  and  shall 
not  subdue  itself  to  the  level  of  a  game.  But  those 
who  enjoy  the  spectacle  of  a  game  played  with  perfect 
skill  will  always  find  reading  Henry  James  an  exciting 
experience. 

It  would  be  unfair,  however,  to  suggest  that  the 
literature  of  Henry  James  can  be  finally  summed  up 
as  a  game.  He  is  unquestionably  a  virtuoso:  he  uses 
his  genius  as  an  instrument  upon  which  he  loves  to 
reveal  his  dexterity,  even  when  he  is  shy  of  revealing 
his  immortal  soul.  But  he  is  not  so  inhuman  in  his 
art  as  some  of  his  admirers  have  held  him  to  be.  Mr. 
Hueffer,  I  think,  has  described  him  as  pitiless,  and  even 
cruel.  But  can  one  call  Daisy  Miller  pitiless?  Or  What 
Maisie  Knew?   Certainly,  those  autobiographical  volumes, 


72  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

A  Small  Boy  and  Others  and  Notes  of  a  Son  and 
Brother,  which  may  be  counted  among  the  most  wonder- 
ful of  the  author's  novels,  are  perv^aded  by  exquisite 
affectiops  which  to  a  pitiless  nature  would  have  been 
impossible. 

Henry  James  is  even  sufficiently  human  to  take  sides 
with  his  characters.  He  never  does  this  to  the  point 
of  lying  about  them.  But  he  is  in  his  own  still  way 
passionately  on  the  side  of  the  finer  types.  In  The 
Turn  of  the  Screw,  which  seems  to  me  to  be  the  greatest 
ghost-story  in  the  English  language,  he  has  dramatized 
the  duel  between  good  and  evil  ;  and  the  effect  of  it, 
at  the  end  of  all  its  horrors,  is  that  of  a  hymn  in  praise 
of  courage.  One  feels — though  a  more  perverse  theory 
of  the  story  has  been  put  forward — that  the  governess, 
who  fights  against  the  evil  in  the  big  house,  has  the 
author  also  fighting  as  her  ally  and  the  children's. 
Similarly,   Maisie   has   a   friend   in   the   author. 

He  is  never  more  human,  perhaps,  than  when  he  is 
writing,  not  about  human  beings,  but  about  books.  It 
is  not  inconceivable  that  he  will  live  as  a  critic  long 
after  he  is  forgotten  as  a  novelist.  No  book  of  criticism 
to  compare  with  his  Notes  on  Novelists  has  been 
pubhshed  in  the  present  century.  He  brought  his 
imagination  to  bear  upon  books  as  he  brought  his 
critical  and  analytical  faculty  to  bear  upon  human  beings. 
Here  there  was  room  for  real  heroes.  He  idolized  his 
authors  as  he  idolized  none  of  his  characters.  There 
is  something  of  moral  passion  in  the  reverence  with 
which  he  writes  of  the  labours  of  Flaubert  and  Balzac 
and  Stevenson  and  even  of  Zola. 

He  lied  none  of  them  into  perfection,  it  is  true. 
He  accepted,  and  even  advertised  their  limitations.  But 
in  each  of  them  he  found  an  example  of  the  hero  as 
artist.  His  characterization  of  Flaubert  as  the  "  opera- 
tive conscience  or  vicarious  sacrifice  "  of  a  styleless 
literary  age  is  the  pure  gold  of  criticism.  "  The  piety 
most  real  to  her,"  Fleda  says  in  The  Spoils  of  Poynton, 


HENRY   JAMES  78 

"was  to  be  on  one's  knees  before  one's  high  standard." 
Henry  James  himself  had  that  kind  of  piety.  Above 
all  recent  men  of  letters,  he  was  on  his  knees  to  his 
high  standard. 

People  may  wonder  whether  his  standard  was  not, 
to  an  excessive  degree,  a  standard  of  subtlety  rather 
than  of  creative  imagination— at  least,  in  his  later  period. 
And  undoubtedly  his  subtlety  was  to  some  extent  a 
matter  of  make-believe.  He  loved  to  take  a  simple 
conversation,  and,  by  introducing  a  few  subtle  changes, 
to  convert  it  into  a  sort  of  hieroglyphics  that  need  an 
interpreter.  He  grew  more  and  more  to  believe  that 
it  was  not  possible  to  tell  the  simple  truth  except  in  an 
involved  way.  He  would  define  a  gesture  with  as  much 
labour  as  Shakespeare  would  devote  to  the  entire  portrait 
of  a  woman.  He  was  a  realist  of  civilized  society  in 
which  both  speech  and  action  have  to  be  sifted  with 
scientific  care  before  they  will  yield  their  grain  of  motive. 
The  humorous  patience  with  which  Henry  James  seeks 
for  that  grain  is  one  of  the  distinctive  features  of  his 
genius. 

But,  it  may  be  asked,  are  his  people  real?  They 
certainly  are  real  in  the  relationships  in  which  he  ex- 
hibits them,  but  they  are  real  like  people  to  whom  one 
has  been  introduced  in  a  foreign  city  rather  than  like 
people  who  are  one's  friends.  One  does  not  remember 
them  like  the  characters  in  Meredith  or  Mr.  Hardy. 
Henry  James,  indeed,  is  himself  the  outstanding  character 
in  his  books.  That  fine  and  humorous  collector  of 
European  ladies  and  gentlemen,  that  savourer  of  the 
Httle  lives  of  the  Old  World  and  the  little  adventures 
of  those  who  have  escaped  from  the  New,  that  artist  who 
brooded  over  his  fellows  in  the  spirit  less  of  a  poet 
than  a  man  of  science,  that  sober  and  fastidious  trifler 
— this  is  the  image  which  presides  over  his  books,  and 
which  gives  them  their  special  character,  and  will  attract 
tiny  but  enthusiastic  companies  of  readers  to  them  for 
many  years  to  come. 


74  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

2.  The  Artist  at  Work. 

Henry  James's  amanuensis,  Miss  Theodora  Bosanquet, 
wrote  an  article  a  year  or  two  ago  in  the  Fortnightly 
Review,  describing  how  the  great  man  wrote  his  novels. 
Since  1895  or  1896  he  dictated  them,  and  they  were 
taken  down,  not  in  shorthand,  but  directly  on  the  type- 
writer. He  was  particular  even  about  the  sort  of  type- 
writer. It  must  be  a  Remington.  "  Other  kinds  sounded 
different  notes,  and  it  was  almost  impossibly  discon- 
certing for  him  to  dictate  to  something  that  made  no 
responsive  sound  at  all."  He  did  not,  however,  pour 
himself  out  to  his  amanuensis  without  having  made  a 
preliminary  survey  of  the  ground.  "  He  liked  to  '  break 
ground  '  by  talking  to  himself  day  by  day  about  the 
characters  and  the  construction  until  the  whole  thing 
was  clearly  before  his  mind's  eye.  This  preliminary 
talking  out  the  scheme  was,  of  course,  duly  recorded 
by  the  typewriter."  It  is  not  that  he  made  rough 
drafts  of  his  novels — sketches  to  be  afterwards  ampli- 
fied. "  His  method  might  better  be  compared  with 
Zola's  habit  of  writing  long  letters  to  himself  about 
characters  in  his  next  book  until  they  became  alive 
enough  for  him  to  begin  a  novel  about  them."  Henry 
James  has  himself,  as  Miss  Bosanquet  points  out, 
described  his  method  of  work  in  The  Death  of  a  Lion, 
in  which  it  is  attributed  to  his  hero,  Neil  Faraday. 
"  Loose,  liberal,  confident,"  he  declares  of  Faraday's 
"  scenario,"  as  one  might  call  it,  "  it  might  be  passed 
for  a  great,  gossiping,  eloquent  letter — the  overflow  into 
talk  of  an  artist's  amorous  plan." 

Almost  the  chief  interest  of  Henry  James's  two  post- 
humous novels  is  the  fact  that  we  are  given  not  only 
the  novels  themselves — or,  rather,  the  fragments  of  them 
that  the  author  had  written — but  the  "  great,  gossiping, 
eloquent  letters  "  in  which  he  soliloquized  about  them. 
As  a  rule,  these  preliminary  soliloquies  ran  to  about 
thirty  thousand  words,  and  were  destroyed  as  soon  as 


HENRY   JAMES  75 


the  novel  in  hand  was  finished.     So  dehghtful  are  they 
— such  thriUing  revelations  of  the  workings  of  an  artist's 
mind — that  one  does  not  quite  know  whether  or  not  to 
congratulate    oneself    on    the    fact    that    the    last    books 
have   been   left  mere   torsos.      Which  would  one   rather 
have — a   complete   novel   or   the    torso   of  a   novel   with 
the   artist's    dream   of   how   to   make   it   perfect?      It    is 
not  easy  to  decide.     What  makes  it  all  the  more  difficult 
to  decide  in   the  present   instance   is  one's   feeling  that 
The  Sense  of  the  Past,  had  it  been  completed,  would 
have    been    very    nearly    a    masterpiece.      In    it    Henry 
James  hoped  to  get  what  he  called  a  "'  kind  of  quasi-turn- 
of -screw  effect."     Here,  as  in   The  Turn  of  the  Screw, 
he    was    dealing    with    a    sort    of   ghosts— whether    sub- 
jective   or   objective    in    their    reahty    does   not    matter. 
His  hero  is  a  young  American  who  had  never  been  to 
Europe  till  he  was  about  thirty,  and  yet  was  possessed 
by  that   almost  sensual  sense  of  the  past  which  made 
Henry  James,  as  a  small  boy,  put  his  nose  into  English 
books  and  try  to  sniff  in  and  smell  from  their  pages  the 
older  world    from  which   they   came.      The   inheritance 
of  an  old  house  in  a  London  square — a  house  in  which 
the   clocks   had    stopped,    as    it   were,   in    1820— brings 
the  young  man  oyer  to  England,  though  the  lady  with 
whom  he  is  in  love  seeks  to  keep  him  in  America  and 
watch  him  developing  as  a  new  species— a  rich,  sensitive, 
and   civiHzed   American,   untouched   and   unsubdued   by 
Europe.     This  young  man's  emotions  in  London,  amid 
old  things  in  an  atmosphere  that  also  somehow  seemed 
mellow  and  old,  may,  1  fancy,  be  taken  as  a  record  of 
the   author's   own   spiritual   experiences   as   he   drew    in 
long  breaths  of  appreciation  during  his  almost  lifelong 
wanderings   in    this    hemisphere.      For    it    is    important 
to    remember    that    Henry    James    never    ceased   to    be 
a  foreigner.      He  was  enchanted   by  England  as  by  a 
strange  land.     He  saw  it  always,  like  the  hero  of  The 
Sense  of  the  Past,  "  under  the  charm   ...   of  the  queer, 
incomparable    London    Hght— unless    one    frankly    loved 


76  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 


it    rather    as    London    shade — which    he    had    repeatedly 
noted  as  so  strange  as  to  be  at  its  finest  sinister." 


'to' 


However  else  this  air  might  have  been  described  it  was  signally 
not  the  light  of  freshness,  and  suggested  as  little  as  possible  the 
element  in  which  the  first  children  of  nature  might  have  begun 
to  take  notice.  Ages,  generations,  inventions,  corruptions,  had 
produced  it,  and  it  seemed,  wherever  it  rested,  to  be  filtered  through 
the  bed  of  history.  It  made  the  objects  about  show  for  the  time 
as  in  something  "  turned  on  " — something  highly  successful  that 
he  might  have  seen  at  the  theatre. 


'o^ 


Henry  James  saw  old-world  objects  in  exactly  that 
sort  of  light.  He  knew  in  his  own  nerves  how  Ralph 
Pendrel  felt  on  going  over  his  London  house.  "  There 
wasn't,"  he  says,  ".  .  .  an  old  hinge  or  an  old  brass 
lock  that  he  couldn't  work  with  love  of  the  act."  He 
could  observe  the  inanimate  things  of  the  Old  World 
almost  as  if  they  were  hving  things.  No  naturalist 
spying  for  patient  hours  upon  birds  in  the  hope  of 
discovering  their  secrets  could  have  had  a  more  curious, 
more  hopeful,  and  more  loitering  eye.  He  found  even 
fairly  common  things  in  Europe,  as  Pendrel  found  the 
things  in  the  house  he  inherited,  "  all  smoothed  with 
service    and    charged   with    accumulated    messages." 

He  was  like  the  worshipper  in  a  Spanish  church,  who  watches 
for  the  tear  on  the  cheek  or  the  blood-drop  from  the  wound  of 
some  wonder-working  c&gy  of  Mother  and  Son. 

In  The  Sense  of  the  Past,  Henry  James  conceived 
a  fantastic  romance,  in  which  his  hero  steps  not  only 
into  the  inheritance  of  an  old  house,  but  into  1820, 
exchanging  personalities  with  a  young  man  in  one  of 
the  family  portraits,  and  even  wooing  the  young  man's 
betrothed.  It  is  a  story  of  "  queer  "  happenings,  like 
the  story  of  a  dream  or  a  delusion  in  which  the  ruling 
passion  has  reached  the  point  of  mania.  It  is  the  kind 
of  story  that  has  often  been  written  in  a  gross, 
mechanical  way.  Here  it  is  all  delicate — a  study  of 
nuances   and   subtle   relationships.      For   Ralph,   though 


HENRY  JAMES  77 


perfect  in  the  1820  manner,  has  something  of  the 
changeling  about  him — something  that  gradually  makes 
people  think  him  "  queer,"  and  in  the  end  arouses  in 
him  the  dim  beginnings  of  nostalgia  for  his  own  time. 
It  is  a  fascinating  theme  as  Henry  James  works  it 
out — doubly  fascinating  as  he  talks  about  it  to  himself 
in  the  "  scenario "  that  is  published  along  with  the 
story.  In  the  latter  we  see  the  author  groping  for  his 
story,  almost  like  a  medium  in  a  trance.  Like  a 
medium,  he  one  moment  hesitates  and  is  vague,  and 
the  next,  as  he  himself  would  say,  fairly  pounces  on  a 
certainty.  No  artist  ever  cried  with  louder  joy  at  the 
sight  of  things  coming  absolutely  right  under  his  hand. 
Thus,  at  one  moment,  the  author  announces:  — 

The  more  I  get  into  my  drama  the  more  magnificent  upon  my 
word  I  seem  to  see  it  and  feel  it ;  with  such  a  tremendous  lot  of 
possibilities  in  it  that  I  positively  quake  in  dread  of  the  muchness 
with  which  they  threaten  me. 

At  a  moment   of   less   illumination   he  writes :  — 

There  glimmers  and  then  floats  shyly  back  to  me  from  afar, 
the  sense  of  something  like  this,  a  bit  difficult  to  put,  though 
entirely  expressible  with  patience,  and  as  I  catch  hold  of  the  tip 
of  the  tail  of  it  yet  again  strikes  me  as  adding  to  my  action  but 
another  admirable  twist. 

He  continually  sees  himself  catching  by  the  tip  of  the 
tail  the  things  that  solve  his  difficulties.  And  what 
tiny  little  animals  he  sometimes  manages  to  catch  by 
the  tip  of  the  tail  in  some  of  his  trances  of  inspiration  ! 
Thus,  at  one  point,  he  breaks  off  excitedly  about  his 
hero  with:  — 

As  to  which,  however,  on  consideration  don't  I  see  myself  catch 
a  bright  betterment  by  not  at  all  making  him  use  a  latch-key  ? 
.  .  .  No,  no — no  latch-key — but  a  rat-tat-tat,  on  his  own  part, 
at  the  big  brass  knocker. 

As  the  writer  searches  for  the  critical  action  or  gesture 


78  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

which  is  to  betray  the  "  abnormalism  "  of  his  hero  to 
the  1820  world  in  which  he  moves,  he  cries  to  himself:  — 

Find  it,  find  it ;  get  it  right,  and  it  will  be  the  making  of  the 
story. 

At  another  stage  in  the  story,  he  cotnments:  — 

All  that  is  feasible  and  convincing  ;  rather  beautiful  to  do  being 
what  I  mean. 

At  yet  another  stage: —  . 

I  pull  up,  too,  here,  in  the  midst  of  my  elation — though  after 
a  little  I  shall  straighten  everything  out. 

He  discusses  with  himself  the  question  whether  Ralph 
Pendrel,  in  the  1820  world,  is  to  repeat  exactly  the 
experience  of  the  young  man  in  the  portrait,  and  con- 
fides to  himself:  — 

Just  now,  a  page  or  two  back,  I  lost  my  presence  of  mind,  I  let 
myself  be  scared,  by  a  momentarily-confused  appearance,  an 
assumption,  that  he  doesn't  repeat  it.  I  see,  on  recovery  of  my 
wits,  not  to  say  of  my  wit,  that  he  very  exactly  does. 

Nowhere  in  the  "  scenario  "  is  the  artist's  pleasure 
in  his  work  expressed  more  finely  than  in  the  passage 
in  which  Henry  James  describes  his  hero  at  the  crisis 
of  his  experience,  when  the  latter  begins  to  feel  that 
he  is  under  the  observation  of  his  alier  ego,  and  is 
being  vaguely  threatened.  "  There  must,"  the  author 
tells  himself — 

There  must  be  sequences  here  of  the  strongest,  I  make  out — 
the  successive  driving  in  of  the  successive  silver-headed  nails  at 
the  very  points  and  under  the  very  tops  that  I  reserve  for  them. 
That's  it,  the  silver  nail,  the  recurrence  of  it  in  the  right  place, 
the  perfection  of  the  salience  of  each,  and  the  trick  is  played. 

"  Trick,"  he  says,  but  Henry  James  resorted  little  to 
tricks,  in  the  ordinary  meaning  of  the  word.  He  scorns 
the  easy  and  the  obvious,  as  in  preparing  for  the  return 


HENRY  JAMES  T9 


of  the  young  hero  to  the  modern  world — a  return  made 
possible  by  a  noble  act  of  self-sacrifice  on  the  part 
of  a  second  1820  girl  who  sends  him  from  her,  yet 
"  without  an  excess  of  the  kind  of  romanticism  I  don't 
want."  There  is  another  woman— the  modern  woman 
whom  Ralph  had  loved  in  America — who  might  help  the 
machinery  of  the  story  (as  the  author  thinks)  if  he 
brought  her  on  the  scene  at  a  certain  stage.  But  he 
thinks  of  the  device  only  to  exclaim  against  it:  — 

Can't  possibly  do  anything  so  artistically  base. 

The  notes  for  The  Ivory  Tower  are  equally  alluring, 
though  The  Ivory  Tower  is  not  itself  so  good  as 
The  Sense  of  the  Past.  It  is  a  story  of  contemporary 
American  life,  and  we  are  told  that  the  author  laid  it 
aside  at  the  beginning  of  the  war,  feeling  that  "  he 
could  no  longer  work  upon  a  fiction  supposed  to  repre- 
sent contemporary  or  recent  life."  Especially  interesting 
is  the  "  scenario,"  because  of  the  way  in  which  we 
find  Henry  James  trying — poor  man,  he  was  always 
an  amateur  at  names  I — to  get  the  right  names  for  his 
characters.  He  ponders,  for  instance,  on  the  name  of 
his   heroine :  — 

I  want  her  name  .  .  .  her  Christian  one,  to  be  Moyra,  and 
must  have  some  bright  combination  with  that ;  the  essence  of  which 
is  a  surname  of  two  syllables  and  ending  in  a  consonant — also 
beginning  with  one.  I  am  thinking  of  Moyra  Grabham,  the  latter 
excellent  thing  was  in  The  Times  of  two  or  three  days  ago  ;  the 
only  fault  is  a  little  too  much  meaning. 

Consciousness  in  artistry  can  seldom  have  descended  to 
minuter  details  with  a  larger  gesture.  One  would  not 
have  missed  these  games  of  genius  with  syllables  and 
consonants  for  worlds.  Is  it  all  an  exquisite  farce  or  is 
it  splendidly  heroic?  Are  we  here  spectators  of  the 
incongruous  heroism  of  an  artist  who  puts  a  hero's 
earnestness  into  getting  the  last  perfection  of  shine 
on  to   a   boot   or   the   last   fine  Shade   of  meaning   into 


«0  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

the  manner  in  which  he  says,  "  No,  thank  you,  no 
sugar"?  No,  it  is  something  more  than  that.  It 
is  the  heroism  of  a  man  who  hved  at  every  turn  and 
trifle  for  his  craft — who  seems  to  have  had  almost  no 
Hfe  outside  it.  In  the  temple  of  his  art,  he  found  the 
very  dust  of  the  sanctuary  holy.  He  had  the  perfect 
piety  of  the  artist  in  the  least  as  well  as  in  the  greatest 
things. 

3.  How  He  was  Born  Again 

As  one  reads  the  last  fragment  of  the  autobiography 
of  Henry  James,  one  cannot  help  thinking  of  him  as 
a  convert  giving  his  testimony.  Henry  James  was 
converted  into  an  Englishman  with  the  same  sense  of 
being  born  again  as  is  felt  by  many  a  convert  to 
Christianity.  He  can  speak  of  the  joy  of  it  all  only, 
in  superlatives.  He  had  the  convert's  sense  of — in  his 
own  phrase — "  agitations,  explorations,  initiations  (I 
scarce  know  how  endearingly  enough  to  name  them  I)." 
He  speaks  of  "  this  really  prodigious  flush  "  of  his 
first  full  experience  of  England.  He  passes  on  the  effect 
of  his  religious  rapture  when  he  tells  us  that  "  really 
wherever  I  looked,  and  still  more  wherever  I  pressed, 
I  sank  in  and  in  up  to  my  nose."  How  breathlessly 
he  conjures  up  the  scene  of  his  dedication,  as  he  calls 
it,  in  the  coffee-room  of  a  Liverpool  hotel  on  that 
gusty,  "  overwhelmingly  English  "  March  morning  in 
1869,  on  which  at  the  age  of  almost  twenty-six  he 
fortunately  and  fatally  landed  on  these  shores, 

with    immediate    intensities    of    appreciation,    as    I    may    call    the 
muffled  accompaniment,  for  fear  of  almost  indecently  overnaming  it. 

He  looks  back,  with  how  exquisite  a  humour  and 
seriousness,  on  that  morning  as  having  finally  settled 
his  destiny  as  an  artist.      "  This  doom,"  he  writes  : — 

This    doom    of    inordinate    exposure    to    appearances,    aspects, 
images,   every  protrusive  item   almost,   in   the  great  beheld  sum 


HENRY   JAMES  81 

of  things,  I  regard  ...  as  having  settled  upon  me  once  for  all 
while  I  observed,  for  instance,  that  in  England  the  plate  of  buttered 
muffins  and  its  cover  were  sacredly  set  upon  the  slop-bowl  after 
hot  water  had  been  ingenuously  poured  into  the  same,  and  had 
seen  that  circumstance  in  a  perfect  cloud  of  accompaniments. 

It  is  characteristic  of  Henry  James  that  he  should 
associate  the  hour  in  which  he  turned  to  grace  with  a 
plate  of  buttered  muffins.  His  fiction  remained  to  the 
end  to  some  extent  the  tale  of  a  buttered  muffin.  He 
made  mountains  out  of  muffins  all  his  days.  His  ecstasy 
and  his  curiosity  were  nine  times  out  of  ten  larger 
than  their  objects.  Thus,  though  he  was  intensely 
interested  in  English  life,  he  was  interested  in  it,  not 
in  its  largeness  as  life  so  much  as  in  its  littleness  as  a 
museum,  almost  a  museum  of  bric-d-brac.  He  was 
enthusiastic  about  the  waiter  in  the  coffee-room  in  the 
Liverpool  hotel  chiefly  as  an  illustration  of  the  works 
of  the  English  novelists. 

Again  and  again  in  his  reminiscences  one  comes  upon 
evidence  that  Henry  James  arrived  in  England  in  the 
spirit  of  a  collector,  a  connoisseur,  as  well  as  that  of 
a  convert.  His  ecstasy  was  that  of  a  convert  :  his 
curiosity  was  that  of  a  connoisseur.  As  he  recalls 
his  first  experience  of  a  London  eating-house  of  the 
old  sort,  with  its  "  small  compartments,  narrow  as  horse- 
stalls,"  he  glories  in  the  sordidness  of  it  all,  because 
"  every   face   was   a  documentary   scrap." 

I  said  to  myself  under  every  shock  and  at  the  hint  of  every  savour 
that  this  it  was  for  an  exhibition  to  reek  with  local  colour,  and  one 
could  dispense  with  a  napkin,  with  a  crusty  roll,  with  room  for 
one's  elbows  or  one's  feet,  with  an  immunity  from  intermittance 
of  the  "  plain  boiled  "  much  better  than  one  could  dispense  with 
that. 

Here,  again,  one  has  an  instance  of  the  way  in  which 
the  show  of  English  life  revealed  itself  to  Henry  James 
as  an  exhibition  of  eating.  "  As  one  sat  there,"  he 
says  of  his  reeking  restaurant,  "  one  understood.'"  It 
is  in  the  same  mood  of  the  connoisseur  on  the  track  of 

6 


82  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

a  precious  discovery  that  he  recalls  *'  the  very  first 
occasion  of  my  sallying  forth  from  Morley's  Hotel  in 
Trafalgar  Square  to  dine  at  a  house  of  sustaining,  of 
inspiring  hospitality  in  the  Kensington  quarter."  What 
an  epicure  the  man  was  !  "  The  thrill  of  sundry  invita- 
tions to  breakfast  "  still  survived  on  his  palate  more 
than  forty  years  afterwards.  Not  that  these  meals 
were  recalled  as  gorges  of  the  stomach  :  they  were 
merely  gorges  of  sensation,  gorges  of  the  sense  of  the 
past.  The  breakfasts  associated  him  "  at  a  jump  " 
with  the  ghosts  of  Byron  and  Sheridan  and  Rogers. 
They  had  also  a  documentary  value  as  '*  the  exciting 
note  of  a  social  order  in  which  every  one  wasn't  hurled 
straight,  with  the  momentum  of  rising,  upon  an  office 
or  a  store.  .  .  ."  It  was  one  morning,  "beside  Mrs. 
Charles  Norton's  tea-room,  in  Queen's  Gate  Terrace," 
that  his  "  thrilling  opportunity "  came  to  sit  opposite 
to  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison,  eminent  in  the  eyes  of  the 
young  American,  not  for  his  own  sake  so  much  as 
because  recently  he  had  been  the  subject  of  Matthew 
Arnold's  banter.  Everybody  in  England,  like  Mr. 
Harrison,  seemed  to  Henry  James  to  be  somebody, 
or  at  least  to  have  been  talked  about  by  somebody. 
They  were  figures,  not  cyphers.  They  were  characters 
in   a   play  with  cross-references. 

The  beauty  was  .  .  .  that  people  had  references,  and  that  a 
reference  was  then,  to  ray  mind,  whether  in  a  person  or  an  object, 
the  most  gUttering,  the  most  becoming  ornament  possible,  a  style 
of  decoration  one  seemed  likely  to  perceive  figures  here  and  there, 
whether  animate  or  no,  quite  groan  under  the  accumulation  and 
the  weight  of. 

It  is  surprising  that,  loving  this  new  life  so 
ecstatically,  James  should  so  seldom  attempt  to  leave 
any  detailed  description  of  it  in  his  reminiscences.  He 
is  constantly  describing  his  raptures  :  he  only  occasion- 
ally describes  the  thing  he  was  rapturous  about.  Almost 
all   he  tells   us  about    "  the   extravagant    youth   of   the 


HENRY  JAMES  83 


aesthetic  period  "  is  that  to  Uve  through  it  "  was  to 
seem  privileged  to  such  immensities  as  history  would 
find  left  her  to  record  but  with  bated  breath."  He 
recalls  again  "  the  particular  sweetness  of  wonder  " 
with  which  he  haunted  certain  pictures  in  the  National 
Gallery,  but  it  is  himself,  not  the  National  Gallery, 
that  he  writes  about.  Of  Titian  and  Rembrandt  and 
Rubens  he  communicates  nothing  but  the  fact  that 
"  the  cup  of  sensation  was  thereby  filled  to  overflowing." 
He  does,  indeed,  give  a  slender  description  of  his  first 
sight  of  Swinburne  in  the  National  Gallery,  but  the 
chief  fact  even  of  this  incident  is  that  "  I  thrilled  .  .  . 
with  the  prodigy  of  this  circumstance  that  I  should 
be  admiring  Titian  in  the  same  breath  with  Mr, 
Swinburne." 

Thus  the  reminiscences  ar^,  in  a  sense,  extraordinarily 
egotistic.  This  is,  however,  not  to  condemn  them. 
Henry  James  is,  as  I  have  already  said,  his  own 
greatest  character,  and  his  portrait  of  his  excitements 
is  one  of  the  most  enrapturing  things  in  the  literature 
of  autobiography.  He  makes  us  share  these  excitements 
simply  by  telling  us  how  excited  he  was.  They  are 
exactly  the  sort  of  excitements  all  of  us  have  felt  on 
being  introduced  to  people  and  places  and  pictures  we 
have  dreamed  about  from  our  youth.  Who  has  not 
felt  the  same  kind  of  joy  as  Henry  James  felt  when 
George  Eliot  allowed  him  to  run  for  the  doctor?  "  I 
shook  off  my  fellow-visitor,"  he  relates,  "  for  swifter 
cleaving  of  the  air,  and  I  recall  still  feeling  that  I 
cleft  it  even  in  the  dull  four-wheeler."  After  he  had 
delivered  his  message,  he  "  cherished  for  the  rest  of 
the  day  the  particular  quality  of  my  vibration."  The 
occasion  of  the  message  to  the  doctor  seems  strangely 
comic  in  the  telling.  On  arriving  at  George  Eliot's,  Henry 
James  found  one  of  G.  H.  Lewes's  sons  lying  in  horrible 
pain  in  the  middle  of  the  floor,  the  heritage  of  an  old 
accident  in  the  West  Indies,  or,  as  Henry  James 
characteristically   describes   it  : — 


84  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 


a  suffered  onset  from  an  angry  bull,  I  seem  to  recall,  who  had  tossed 
or  otherwise  mauled  him,  and,  though  beaten  off,  left  him  consider- 
ably compromised. 

There     is    something    still    more    comic    than    this, 
however,    to  be  got  out   of   his   visits   to   George  Eliot. 
The  visit  he  paid  her  at  Witley  under  the  "  much-waved 
wing  "   of   the   irrepressible  Mrs.    Greville,   who   "  knew 
no   law  but  that  of  innocent  and  exquisite  aberration," 
had    a    superb    conclusion,    which    "  left    our    adventure 
an    approved    ruin."      As    James    was    about    to    leave, 
and  indeed  was  at  the  step  of  the  brougham  with  Mrs. 
Greville,  G.  H.  Lewes  called  on  him  to  wait  a  moment. 
He    returned    to    the    doorstep,    and    waited    till    Lewes 
hurried   back   across  the  hall,    "  shaking  high   the   pair 
of    blue-bound    volumes    his    allusion    to    the    uninvited, 
the  verily  importunate  loan  of  which  by  Mrs.   Greville 
had    lingered    on    the    air    after    his    dash    in    quest   of 
them  "  :— 

"  Ah,  those  books — take  them  away,  please,  away,  away  !  " 
1  hear  him  unreservedly  plead  while  he  thrusts  them  again  at  me, 
and   I  scurry  back  into  our  conveyance. 

The  blue-bound  volumes  happened  to  be  a  copy  of 
Henry  James's  own  new  book — a  presentation  copy  he 
had  given  to  Mrs.  Greville,  and  she,  in  turn,  with  the 
best  intentions,  had  tried  to  leave  with  George  Eliot, 
to  be  read  and  admired.  George  Eliot  and  Lewes 
had  failed  to  connect  their  young  visitor  with  the 
volumes.  Hence  a  situation  so  comic  that  even  its 
victim  could  not  but  enjoy  it  : — 

Our  hosts  hadn't  so  much  as  connected  book  with  author, 
or  author  with  visitor,  or  visitor  with  anything  but  the  con- 
venience of  his  ridding  them  of  an  unconsidered  trifle  ;  grudging, 
as  they  so  justifiedly  did,  the  impingement  of  such  matters 
on  their  consciousness.  The  vivid  demonstration  of  one's  failure 
to  penetrate  there  had  been  in  the  sweep  of  Lewes 's  gesture, 
which  could  scarcely  have  been  bettered  by  his  actually  wielding 
a  broom. 


HENRY  JAMES  85 

Henry  James  was  more  fortunate  in  Tennyson  as 
a  host.  Tennyson  had  read  at  least  one  of  his  stories 
and  liked  it.  All  the  same,  James  was  disappointed 
in  Tennyson.  He  expected  to  find  him  a  poet  signed 
and  stamped,  and  found  him  only  a  booming  bard.  Not 
only  was  Tennyson  not  Tennysonian  :  he  Was  not  quite 
real.     His  conversation  came  as  a  shock  to  his  guest  : — 

He  struck  me  as  neither  knowing  nor  communicating  knowledge. 

As  Tennyson  read  Locksley  Hall  to  his  guests, 
Henry  James  had  to  pinch  himself,  "  not  at  all  to 
keep  from  swooning,  but  much  rather  to  set  up  some 
rush  of  sensibility."  What  a  lovely  touch  of  malice 
there  is  in  his  description  of  Tennyson  on  an  occasion 
on  which  the  ineffable  Mrs.  Greville  quoted  some  of 
his  own  verse  to  him  : — 

He  took  these  things  with  a  gruff  philosophy,  and  could  always 
repay  them,  on  the  spot,  in  heavily-shovelled  coin  of  the  same 
mint,  since  it  was  a  question  of  his  genius. 

Henry  James  ever  retained  a  beautiful  detachment 
of  intellect,  even  after  his  conversion.  He  was  a  wit 
as  well  as  an  enthusiast.  The  Middle  Years,  indeed, 
is  precious  in  every  page  for  its  wit  as  well  as  for 
its  confessional  raptures.  It  may  be  objected  that 
Henry  James's  wit  is  only  a  new  form  of  the  old- 
fashioned  periphrasis.  He  might  be  described  as  the 
last  of  the  periphrastic  humorists.  At  the  same  time, 
if  ever  in  any  book  there  was  to  be  found  the  free 
play  of  an  original  genius — a  genius  however  limited 
and  even  little — it  is  surely  in  the  autobiography  of 
Henry  James.  Those  who  can  read  it  at  all  will 
read   it  with  shining  eyes. 


VII 
BROWNING:    THE   POET    OF    LOVE 

Browning's  reputation  has  not  yet  risen  again  beyond 
a  half-tide.  The  fact  that  two  books  about  him  were 
pubHshed  during  the  war,  however,  suggests  that  there 
is  a  revival  of  interest  in  his  work.  It  would  have 
been  surprising  if  this  had  not  been  so.  He  is  one 
of  the  poets  who  inspire  confidence  at  a  time  when 
all  the  devils  are  loosed  out  of  Hell.  Browning  was 
the  great  challenger  of  the  multitude  of  devils.  He 
did  not  achieve  his  optimism  by  ignoring  Satan,  but 
by  defying  him.  His  courage  was  not  merely  of  the 
stomach,  but  of  the  daring  imagination.  There  is  no 
more  detestable  sign  of  literary  humbug  than  the 
pretence  that  Browning  was  an  optimist  simply  because 
he  did  not  experience  sorrow  and  indigestion  as  other 
people  do.  I  do  not  mean  to  deny  that  he,  enjoyed 
good  health.  As  Professor  Phelps,  of  Yale,  says  in  a 
recent  book,  Robert  Browning:   How  to  Know  Him  : — 

He  had  a  truly  wonderful  digestion  :  it  was  his  firm  belief  that 
one  should  eat  only  what  one  really  enjoyed,  desire  being  the 
infallible  sign  that  the  food  was  healthful.  "  My  father  was  a 
man  of  bonne  foiirchette,"  said  Barett  Browning  to  me  ;  "he  was 
not  very  fond  of  meat,  but  liked  all  kinds  of  Italian  dishes,  especially 
with  rich  sauces.  He  always  ate  freely  of  rich  and  delicate  things. 
He  would  make  a  whole  meal  off  mayonnaise." 

Upon  which  the  American  professor  comments  with 
ingenuous  humour  of  a  kind  rare  in  professors  in  this 
hemisphere :  — 

It   is   pleasant   to    remember    that    Emerson,   the   other   great 
optimist  of  the  century,  used  to  eat  pie  for  breakfast. 

86 


BROWNING:   THE  POET  OF  LOVE  87 

The  man  who  does  not  suffer  from  pie  will  hardly 
suffer  from  pessimism  ;  but,  as  Professor  Phelps  insists, 
BroAvning  faced  greater  terrors  than  pie  for  breakfast, 
and  his  philosophy  did  not  flinch.  There  was  no  other 
English  writer  of  the  nineteenth  century  who  to  the 
same  degree  made  all  human  experiences  his  own. 
His  poems  are  not  poems  about  little  children  who 
win  good-conduct  prizes.  They  are  poems  of  the 
agonies  of  life,  poems  about  tragic  severance,  poems 
about  failure.  They  range  through  the  virtues  and 
the  vices  with  the  magnificent  boldness  of  Dostoevsky's 
novels.  The  madman,  the  atheist,  the  adulterer,  the 
traitor,  the  murderer,  the  beast,  are  portrayed  in  them 
side  by  side  with  the  hero,  the  saint,  and  the  perfect 
woman.  There  is  every  sort  of  rogue  here  half-way 
between  good  and  evil,  and  every  sort  of  half-hero 
who  is  either  worse  than  his  virtue  or  better  than  his 
sins.  Nowhere  else  in  English  poetry  outside  the  works 
of  Shakespeare  and  Chaucer  is  there  such  a  varied 
and  humorous  gallery  of  portraits.  Landor's  often 
quoted  comparison  of  Browning  with  Chaucer  is  a  piece 
of  perfect  and  essential  criticism  : — 

Since  Chaucer  was  alive  and  hale. 
No  man  hath  walked  along  our  roads  with  step 
So  active,  so  inquiring  eye,  or  tongue 
So  varied  in  discourse. 

For  Browning  was  a  portrait-painter  by  genius  and  a 
philosopher  only  by  accident.  He  Was  a  historian  even 
more  than  a  moralist.  He  was  born  with  a  passion 
for  living  in  other  people's  experiences.  So  impartially 
and  eagerly  did  he  make  himself  a  voice  of  the  evil  as 
well  as  the  good  in  human  nature  that  occasionally  one 
has  heard  people  speculating  as  to  whether  he  can 
have  led  so  reputable  a  life  as  the  biographers  make 
one  believe.  To  speculate  in  this  manner,  however,  is 
to  blunder  into  forgetfulness  of  Browning's  own  answer, 
in  How  it  Strikes  a  Contemporary^  to  all  such  calumnies 
on   poets, 


88  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

Of  all  the  fields  of  human  experience,  it  was  love 
into  which  the  imagination  of  Browning  most  fully- 
entered.  It  may  seem  an  obvious  thing  to  say- 
about  almost  any  poet,  but  Browning  differed  from 
other  poets  in  being  able  to  express,  not  only  the  love 
of  his  own  heart,  but  the  love  of  the  hearts  of  all  sorts 
of  people.  He  dramatized  evei-y  kind  of  love  from  the 
spiritual  to  the  sensual.  One  might  say  of  him  that 
there  never  was  another  poet  in  whom  there  was  so 
much  of  the  obsession  of  love  and  so  little  of  the 
obsession  of  sex.  Love  was  for  him  the  crisis  and 
test  of  a  man's  life.  The  disreputable  lover  has 
his  say  in  Browning's  monologues  no  less  than  Count 
Gismond.  Porphyria's  lover,  mad  and  a  murderer, 
lives  in  our  imaginations  as  brightly  as  the  idealistic 
lover  of  Cristina. 

The  dramatic  lyric  and  monologue  in  which  Bro\^ming 
set  forth  the  varieties  of  passionate  experience  was 
an  art-form  of  immense  possibilities,  which  it  was  a 
Avork  of  genius  to  discover.  To  say  that  Browning, 
the  inventor  of  this  amazingly  fine  form,  was  indifferent 
to  form  has  always  seemed  to  me  the  extreme  of 
stupidity.  At  the  same  time,  its  very  newness  puzzles 
many  readers,  even  to-day.  Some  people  cannot  read 
Browning  without  note  or  comment,  because  they  are 
unable  to  throw  themselves  imaginatively  into  the  "  I  " 
of  each  new  poem.  Our  artistic  sense  is  as  yet  so  little 
developed  that  many  persons  are  appalled  by  the  energy 
of  imagination  which  is  demanded  of  them  before  they 
are  reborn,  as  it  were,  into  the  setting  of  his  dramatic 
studies.  Professor  Phelps's  book  should  be  of  especial 
service  to  such  readers,  because  it  will  train  them 
in  the  right  method  of  approach  to  Browning's  best 
work.  It  is  a  very  admirable  essay  in  popular  literary 
interpretation.  One  is  astonished  by  its  insight  even 
more  than  by  its  recurrent  banality.  There  are  sentences 
that   will  make   the   fastidious   shrink,    such   as  : — 

The  commercial  worth  of  Pauline  was  exactly  zero, 


BROWNING:   THE  POET  OF  LOVE  89 

And  :— 

Their  (the  Brownings')  love-letters  reveal  a  drama  of  noble 
passion  that  excels  in  beauty  and  intensity  the  universally  popular 
examples  of  Heloise  and  Abelard,  Aucassin  and  Nicolette,  Paul 
and  Virginia. 

And,  again,  in  the  story  of  the  circumstances  that  led 
to   Browning's   death  : — 

In  order  to  prove  to  his  son  that  nothing  was  the  matter  with 
him,  he  ran  rapidly  up  three  flights  of  stairs,  the  son  vainly  trying 
to  restrain  him.  Nothing  is  more  characteristic  of  the  youthful 
folly  of  aged  folk  than  their  impatient  resentment  of  proffered 
hygienic  advice. 

Even  the  interpretations  of  the  poems  sometimes  take 
one's  breath  away,  as  when,  discussing  The  Lost 
Mistress,    Professor    Phelps   observes   that   the   lover  : — 

instead  of  thinking  of  his  own  misery  .  .  .  endeavours  to  make 
the  awkward  situation  easier  for  the  girl  by  small  talk  about  the 
sparrows  and  the  leaf-buds. 

When  one  has  marvelled  one's  fill  at  the  professor's 
phrases  and  misunderstandings,  however,  one  is  com- 
pelled to  admit  that  he  has  written  what  is  probably  the 
best   popular  introduction   to  Browning  in  existence. 

Professor  Phelps's  book  is  one  of  those  rare  essays  in 
popular  criticism  which  will  introduce  an  average  reader 
to  a  world  of  new  excitements.  One  of  its  chief  virtues 
is  that  it  is  an  anthology  as  well  as  a  commentary. 
It  contains  more  than  fifty  complete  poems  of  Browning 
quoted  in  the  body  of  the  book.  And  these  include, 
not  merely  short  poems  like  Meeting  at  Night,  but  long 
poems,  such  as  Andrea  del  Sarto,  Caliban  on  Setebos, 
and  Chitde  Roland  to  the  Dark  Tower  Came.  This 
is  the  right  kind  of  introduction  to  a  great  author. 
The  poet  is  allowed  as  far  as  possible  to  be  his  own 
interpreter. 

At  the  outset  Professor  Phelps  quotes  in  full 
Transcendentalism  and  How  it  Strikes  a  Contemporary 
as  Browning's  confession  of  his  aims  as  an  artist.     The 


90  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

first  of  these  is  Browning's  most  energetic  assertion 
that  the  poet  is  no  philosopher  concerned  with  ideas 
rather  than  with  things — with  abstractions  rather  than 
with  actions.  His  disciples  have  written  a  great  many 
books  that  seem  to  reduce  him  from  a  poet  to  a; 
philosopher,  and  one  cannot  protest  too  vehemently 
against  this  dulling  of  an  imagination  richer  than  a. 
child's  in  adventures  and  in  the  passion  for  the  detailed 
and  the  concrete.  In  Transcendentalism  he  bids  a 
younger  poet  answer  whether  there  is  more  help  to 
be  got  from  Jacob  Boehme  with  his  subtle  meanings  : — 

Or  some  stout  Mage  like  him  of  Halberstadt, 

John,  who  made  things  Boehme  wrote  thoughts  about. 

iWith  how  magnificent  an  image  he  then  justifies 
the  poet  of  "  things  "  as  compared  with  the  philosopher 
of  "  thoughts  "  :— 

He  with  a  "  look  you  !  "  vents  a  brace  of  rhymes, 
And  in  there  breaks  the  sudden  rose  herself, 
Over  us,  under,  round  us  every  side. 
Nay,  in  and  out  the  tables  and  the  chairs 
And  musty  volumes,  Boehme's  book  and  all — 
Buries  us  with  a  glory,  young  once  more, 
Pouring  heaven  into  this  poor  house  of  life. 

One  of  the  things  one  constantly  marvels  at  as  one 
reads  Browning  is  the  splendid  sestheticism  vnth  which 
he  lights  up  prosaic  words  and  pedestrian  details  with 
beauty. 

The  truth  is,  if  we  do  not  feahze  that  he  is  a 
great  singer  and  a  great  painter  as  well  as  a.  great 
humorist  and  realist,  we  shall  have  read  him  in  vain. 
No  doubt  his  phrases  are  often  as  grotesque  as  jagged 
teeth,  as  when  the  mourners  are  made  to  say  in  A 
Grammarian's  Funeral  : — 

Look  out  if  yonder  be  not  day  again, 
Rimming  the  rock-row  ! 

Reading  the  second  of  these  lines  one  feels  as  if 
one   of   the   m.ourners   had   stubbed   his   foot   against   a 


BROWNING:   THE  POET  OF  LOVE  91 

sharp  stone  on  the  mountain-path.  And  yet,  if  Browning 
invented  a  harsh  speech  of  his  own  for  common  use,  he 
uttered  it  in  all  the  varied  rhythms  of  genius  and 
passion.  There  may  often  be  no  music  in  the  individual 
words,  but  there  is  always  in  the  poems  as  a,  whole 
a  deep  undercurrent  of  music  as  from  some  hidden 
river.  His  poems  have  the  movement  of  living  things. 
They  are  lacking  only  in  smooth  and  static  loveliness. 
They    are   full  of   the   hoof-beats   of    Pegasus. 

We  find  in  his  poems,  indeed,  no  fastidious  escape 
from  life,  but  an  exalted  acceptance  of  it.  Browning 
is  one  of  the  very  few  poets  who,  echoing  the  Creator, 
have  declared  that  the  world  is  good.  His  sense  of 
the  goodness  of  it  even  in  foulness  and  in  failure  is 
written  over  half  of  his  poems.  Childe  Roland  to  the 
Dark  Tower  Came  is  a  fable  of  life  triumphant  in 
a  world  tombstoned  with  ^every  abominable  and  hostile 
thing — a  world,  too,  in  which  the  hero  is  doomed  to 
perish  at  devilish  hands.  WJienever  one  finds  oneself 
doubting  the  immensity  of  Browning's  genius,  one  has 
only  to  read  Childe  Roland  again  to  restore  one's 
faith.  There  never  was  a  landscape  so  alive  with 
horror  as  that  amid  which  the  knight  travelled  in  quest 
of  the  Dark  Tower.  As  detail  is  added  to  detail,  it 
becomes  horrible  as  suicide,  a  shrieking  progress  of 
all  the  torments,  till  one  is  wrought  up  into  a  very 
nightmare  of  apprehension  and  the  Tower  itself 
appears  : — 

The  round  squat  tower,  blind  as  the  fool's  heart. 

Was  there  ever  such  a  pause  and  gathering  of  courage 
as  in  the  verses  that  follow  in  which  the  last  of  the 
knights  takes  his  resolve?:  — 

Not  see  ?  because  of  night  perhaps  ? — why,  day 
Came  back  again  for  that  !  before  it  left. 
The  dying  sunset  kindled  through  a  cleft  : 
The  hills,  like  giants  at  a  hunting,  lay 
Chin  upon  hand,  to  see  the  game  at  bay — 

"  Now  stab  p,nd  end  the  creature — to  the  heft  |  " 


92  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 

Not  hear  ?     When  noise  was  everywhere  !  it  tolled 
Increasing  like  a  bell.     Names  in  my  ears. 
Of  all  the  lost  adventurers  my  peers — 

How  such  a  one  was  strong,  and  such  was  bold. 

And  such  was  fortunate,  yet  each  of  old 

Lost,  lost  !  one  moment  knelled  the  woe  of  years. 

There  they  stood,  ranged  along  the  hillside,  met 
To  view  the  last  of  me,  a  living  frame 
For  one  more  picture  !   in  a  sheet  of  flame 

I  saw  them  and  I  knew  them  all.     And  yet 

Dauntless  the  slug-horn  to  my  lips  I  set. 

And  blew.     "  Childe  Roland  to  the  Dark  Tower  came." 

There,  if  anywhere  in  Hterature,  is  the  summit  of  tragic 
and  triumphant  music.  There,  it  seems  to  me,  is  as 
profound  and  imaginative  expression  of  the  heroic  spirit 
as   is  to  be  found  in  the  English  language. 

To  behttle  Browning  as  an  artist  after  such  a  poem 
is  to  blaspheme  against  art.  To  belittle  him  as  an 
optimist  is  to  play  the  fool  with  words.  Browning  was 
an  optimist  only  in  the  sense  that  he  believed  in  what 
Stevenson  called  "  the  ultimate  decency  of  things,"  and 
that  he  believed  in  the  capacity  of  the  heroic  spirit  to 
face  any  test  devised  for  it  by  inquisitors  or  devils. 
He  was  not  defiant  in  a  fine  attitude  like  Byron.  His 
defiance  was  rather  a  form  of  magnanimity.  He  is 
said,  on  Robert  Buchanan's  authority,  to  have  thundered 
"  No,"  when  in  his  later  years  he  was  asked  if  he  were 
a  Christian.  But  his  defiance  was  the  defiance  of  a 
Christian,  the  dauntlessness  of  a  knight  of  the  Holy 
Ghost.  Perhaps  it  is  that  he  was  more  Christian  than 
the  Christians.  Like  the  Pope  in  The  Ring  and  the 
Book,  he  loathed  the  association  of  Christianity  with 
respectability.  Some  readers  are  bewildered  by  his 
respectability  in  trivial  things,  such  as  dress,  into  fail- 
ing to  see  his  hatred  of  respectability  when  accepted  as 
a  standard  in  spiritual  things.  He  is  more  sympathetic 
towards  the  disreputable  suicides  in  Apparent  Failure 
than   towards   the   vacillating   and   respectable   lovers    in 


BROWNING:   THE  POET   OF   LOVE  98 


The   Statue  and  the   Bust.      There   was   at   least   a   hint 
of    heroism    in    the    last    madness    of    the   doomed    men. 
Browning  again  and  again  protests,  as  Blake  had  done 
earlier,  against  the  mean  moral  values  of  his  age.     Energy 
to  him  as  to  Blake  meant  endless  delight,  and  especially 
those  two  great  energies  of  the  spirit — love  and  heroism. 
For,    though   his    work    is    not    a    philosophic   expression 
of  moral  ideas,  it  is  an  imaginative  expression  of  moral 
ideas,   as   a   result   of  which  he   is,   above   all,   the   poet 
of  lovers  and  heroes.      Imagination   is   a  caged  bird  in 
these    days  ;     with    Browning    it    was    a    soaring   eagle. 
In  some  ways  Mr.  Conrad's  is  the  most  heroic  imagination 
in  contemporary   literature.      But  he  does  not   take  this 
round  globe  of   light  and  darkness   into  his  purview  as 
Browning   did.      The    whole   earth    is    to    him   shadowed 
with  futility.      Browning  was  too   lyrical  to  resign  him- 
self   to    the    shadows.      He    saw   the    earth   through    the 
eyes  of   a   lover   till    the    end.      He   saw   death   itself  as 
no  more   than  an  interlude  of   pain,   darkness,  and  cold 
before   a   lovers'    meeting.      It   may   be   that   it    is   all  a 
rapturous    illusion,    and    that,    after    we    have    laid   him 
aside    and   slept    a  night's    broken   sleep,    we    sink    back 
again  naturally  into  the  little  careful  hopes  and  infidelities 
of  everyday.     But  it  seems  to  me  that  here  is  a  whole 
heroic  literature  to  which  the  world  will  always  do  well 
to    turn    in    days    of    inexorable    pain    and    horror    such 
as  those  through  which  it  has  but  recently  passed. 


VIII 
THE    FAME    OF    J.    M.    SYNGE 

The  most  masterly  piece  of  literary  advertising  in  modern 
times  was  surely  Mr.  Yeats's  enforcement  of  Synge  upon 
the  coteries— or  the  choruses — as  a  writer  in  the  great 
tradition  of  Homer  and  Shakespeare.  So  successful  has 
Mr.  Yeats  been,  indeed,  in  the  exaltation  of  his  friend, 
that  people  are  in  danger  of  forgetting  that  it  is  Mr. 
Yeats  himself,  and  not  Synge,  who  is  the  ruling  figure 
in  modern  Irish  literature.  One  does  not  criticize  Mr. 
Yeats  for  this.  During  the  Synge  controversy  he  was 
a  man  raising  his  voice  in  the  heat  of  battle— a  man, 
too,  praising  a  generous  comrade  who  was  but  lately 
dead.  The  critics  outside  Ireland,  however,  have  had 
none  of  these  causes  of  passion  to  prevent  them  from 
seeing  Synge  justly.  They  simply  bowed  down  before 
the  idol  that  Mr.  Yeats  had  set  up  before  them,  and 
danced  themselves  into  ecstasies  round  the  image  of  the 
golden  playboy. 

Mr.  Howe,  who  wrote  a  sincere  and  able  book  on 
Synge,  may  be  taken  as  a  representative  apostle  of  the 
Synge  cult.  He  sets  before  us  a  god,  not  a  man— a 
creator  of  absolute  beauty— and  he  asks  us  to  accept 
the  common  view  that  The  Playboy  of  the  Western 
World  is  his  masterpiece.  There  can  never  be  any 
true  criticism  of  Synge  till  we  have  got  rid  of  all  these 
obsessions  and  idolatries.  Synge  was  an  extraordinary 
man  of  genius,  but  he  was  not  an  extraordinarily  great 
man  of  genius.  He  is  not  the  peer  of  Shakespeare  : 
he  is  not  the  peer  of  Shelley  :  he  is  the  peer,  say,  of 
Stevenson.       His    was    a    byway,    not    a    high-road,    of 

94 


THE  FAME  OF  J.   M.   SYNGE  95 

genius.  That  is  why  he  has  an  immensely  more 
enthusiastic  following  among  clfever  people  than  among 
simple  people. 

Once  and  once  only  Synge  achieved  a  piece  of  art 
that  was  universal  in  its  appeal,  satisfying  equally  the 
artistic  formula  of  Pater  and  the  artistic  formula 
of  Tolstoi.  This  was  Riders  to  the  Sea.  Riders 
to  the  Sea,  a  lyrical  pageant  of  pity  made  out 
of  the  destinies  of  fisher-folk,  is  a  play  that  would 
have  been  understood  in  ancient  Athens  or  in  Elizabethan 
London,  as  well  as  by  an  audience  of  Irish  peasants 
to-day. 

Here,  incidentally,  we  get  a  foretaste  of  that  preoccu- 
pation with  death  which  heightens  the  tensity  in  so  much 
of  Synge's  work.  There  is  a  corpse  on  the  stage  in 
Riders  to  the  Sea,  and  a  man  laid  out  as  a  corpse  in 
In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen,  and  there  is  a  funeral  party 
in  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World.  Synge's  imagina- 
tion dwelt  much  among  the  tombs.  Even  in  his  comedies, 
his  laughter  does  not  spring  from  an  exuberant  joy 
in  life  so  much  as  from  excitement  among  the 
incongruities  of  a  world  that  is  due  to  death.  Hence 
he  cannot  be  summed  up  either  as  a  tragic  or  a  comic 
writer.  He  is  rather  a  tragic  satirist  with  the  soul  of 
a  lyric  poet. 

If  he  is  at  his  greatest  in  Riders  to  the  Sea,  he  is 
at  his  most  personal  in  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  and 
this  is  essentially  a  tragic  satire.  It  is  a  symbolic 
play  woven  out  of  the  illusions  of  two  blind  beggars. 
Mr.  Howe  says  that  "  there  is  nothing  for  the  symbolists 
in  The  Well  of  the  Saints,''  but  that  is  because  he  is 
anxious  to  prove  that  Synge  was  a  great  creator  of 
men  and  women.  Synge,  in  my  opinion  at  least,  was 
nothing  of  the  sort.  His  genius  was  a  genius  of 
decoration,  not  of  psychology.  One  might  compare  it 
to  firelight  in  a  dark  room,  throwing  fantastic  shapes 
on  the  walls.  He  loved  the  fantastic,  and  he  was  held 
by  the  darkness.      Both  in   speech  and   in  character,   it 


96  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

was  the  bizarre  and  even  the  freakish  that  attracted 
him.  In  Riders  to  the  Sea  he  wrote  as  one  who  had 
been  touched  by  the  simple  tragedy  of  human  hfe.  But, 
as  he  went  on  writing  and  working,  he  came  to  look  on 
life  more  and  more  as  a  pattern  of  extravagances,  and 
he  exchanged  the  noble  style  of  Riders  to  the  Sea  for 
the  gauded  and  overwrought  style  of   The  Playboy. 

"  With  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World,"'  says 
Mr.  Howe,  "  Synge  placed  himself  among  the  masters." 
But  then  Mr.  Howe  thinks  that  "  Pegeen  Mike  is  one  of 
the  most  beautiful  and  living  figures  in  all  drama," 
and   that    she    "  is   the   normal,"   and   that 

Synge,  with  an  originality  more  absolute  than  Wordsworth's, 
insisted  that  his  readers  should  regain  their  poetic  feeling  for 
ordinary  life  ;  and  presented  them  with  Pegeen  with  the  stink 
of  poteen  on  her,  and  a  playboy  wet  and  crusted  with  his  father's 
blood. 

The  conception  of  ordinary  life — or  is  it  only  ordinary 
Irish  life? — in  the  last  half -sentence  leaves  one  meditating. 

But,  after  all,  it  is  not  Synge's  characters  or  his 
plots,  but  his  language,  which  is  his  great  contribution 
to  literature.  I  agree  with  Mr.  Howe  that  the 
question  how  far  his  language  is  the  language  of  ythe 
Irish  countryside  is  a  minor  one.  On  the  other  hand, 
it  is  worth  noting  that  he  wrote  most  beautifully  in 
the  first  enthusiasm  of  his  discovery  of  the  wonders 
of  Irish  peasant  speech.  His  first  plays  express,  as 
it  were,  the  delight  of  first  love.  He  was  always  a 
shaping  artist,  of  course,  in  search  of  figures  and  patterns  ; 
but  he  kept  his  passion  for  these  things  subordinate 
to  reality  in  the  early  plays.  In  The  Playboy  he  seemed 
to  be  determined  to  write  riotously,  like  a  man  strain- 
ing after  vitality.  He  exaggerated  everything.  He 
emptied  bagfuls  of  wild  phrases — the  collections  of  years 
— into  the  conversations  of  a  few  minutes.  His  style 
became,  in  a  literary  sense,  vicious,  a  thing  of  tricks 
and  conventions  :  blank-verse  rhythms — I  am  sure  there 
are  a  hundred  blank -verse  lines  in  the  play — and  otiose 


THE  FAME  OF  J.   M.  SYNGE  97 

adjectives  crept  in  and  spoilt  it  as  prose.  It  became 
like  a  parody  of  the  beautiful  English  Synge  wrote  in 
the  noon  of  his  genius. 

I  cannot  understand  the  special  enthusiasm  for  The 
Playboy  except  among  those  who  read  it  before  they 
knew  anything  of  Synge's  earlier  and  better  work.  With 
all  its  faults,  however,  it  is  written  by  the  hand  of 
genius,  and  the  first  hearing  or  reading  of  it  must  come 
as  a  revelation  to  those  who  do  not  know  Riders  to  the 
Sea  or  The  Well  of  the  Saints.  Even  when  it  is  played, 
as  it  is  now  played,  in  an  expurgated  form,  and  with 
sentimentality  substituted  for  the  tolerant  but  Mephisto- 
phelean malice  which  Synge  threaded  into  it,  the  genius 
and  originality  are  obvious  enough.  Tlie  Playboy  is 
a  marvellous  confection,  but  it  is  to  Riders  to  the  Sea 
one  turns  in  search  of  Synge  the  immortal  poet. 


IX 
VILLON:    THE    GENIUS    OF    THE    TAVERN 

It  is  to  Stevenson's  credit  that  he  was  rather  sorry 
that  he  had  ever  written  his  essay  on  Villon.  He  explains 
that  this  was  due  to  the  fact  that  he  "  regarded  Villon 
as  a  bad  fellow,"  but  one  likes  to  think  that  his  conscience 
was  also  a  little  troubled  because  through  lack  of 
sympathy  he  had  failed  to  paint  a  just  portrait  of  a 
man  of  genius.  Villon  was  a  bad  fellow  enough  in  all 
conscience.  He  was  not  so  bad,  however,  as  Stevenson 
made  him  out.  He  was,  no  doubt,  a  thief  ;  he  had 
killed  a  man  ;  and  it  may  even  be  {ii  we  are  to  read 
autobiography  into  one  of  the  most  shocking  portions 
of  the  Grand  Testament)  that  he  lived  for  a  time  on 
the  earnings  of  "  la  grosse  Margot."  But,  for  all  this, 
he  was  not  the  utterly  vile  person  that  Stevenson  be- 
lieved. His  poetry  is  not  mere  whining  and  whimpering 
of  genius  which  occasionally  clianges  its  mood  and  sticks 
its  fingers  to  its  nose.  It  is  rather  the  confession  of 
a  man  who  had  wandered  over  the  "  crooked  hills  of 
delicious  pleasure,"  and  had  arrived  in  rags  and  filth 
in  the  famous  city  of  Hell.  It  is  a  map  of  disaster 
and  a  chronicle  of  lost  souls.  Swinburne  defined  the 
genius  of  Villon  more  imaginatively  than  Stevenson  when 
he  addressed  him  in  a  paradoxical  line  as  : 

Bird  of  the  bitter  bright  grey  golden  morn, 
and   spoke  of   his   "  poor,   perfect   voice," 

That  rings  athwart  the  sea  whence  no  man  steer*. 
Like  joy-bells  crossed  with  death-bells  in  our  ears. 


VILLON :   THE  GENIUS  OF  THE   TAVERN    99 

No  man  who  has  ever  written  has  so  cunningly 
mingled  joy-bells  and  death-bells  in  his  music.  Here 
is  a  realism  of  damned  souls — damned  in  their  merry 
sins — at  which  the  writer  of  Ecclesiastes  merely  seems 
to  hint  like  a  detached  philosopher.  Villon  may  never 
have  achieved  the  last  faith  of  the  penitent  thief.  But 
he  was  a  penitent  thief  at  least  in  his  disillusion.  If 
he  continues  to  sing  Carpe  diem  when  at  the  age 
of  thirty  he  is  already  an  old,  diseased  man,  he  sings 
it  almost  with  a  sneer  of  hatred.  It  is  from  the  lips 
of  a  grinning  death's-head — not  of  a  jovial  roysterer, 
as  Henley  makes  it  seem  in  his  slang  translation — that 
the  Ballade  de  bonne  Doctrine  a  ceux  de  mauvaise  Vie 
falls,    with    its    refrain   of    destiny  : 

Tout  aux  tavernes  et  aux  fiUes. 

And  the  Ballade  de  la  Belle  Heaulmiere  aux  Filles  de 
Joie,  in  which  Age  counsels  Youth  to  take  its  pleasure 
and  its  fee  before  the  evil  days  come,  expresses  no 
more  joy  of  living  than  the  dismallest  nieniento  nwri. 

One  must  admit,  of  course,  that  the  obsession  of 
vice  is  strong  in  Villon's  work.  In  this  he  is  prophetic 
of  much  of  the  greatest  French  literature  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  He  had  consorted  with  criminals  beyond 
most  poets.  It  is  not  only  that  he  indulged  in  the  sins 
of  the  flesh.  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  that  there  exists 
any  sin  of  which  he  and  his  companions  were  not  capable. 
He  was  apparently  a  member  of  the  famous  band  of 
thieves  called  the  Coquillards,  the  sign  of  which  was 
a  cockle-shell  in  the  cap,  "  which  was  the  sign  of  the 
Pilgrim."  "  It  was  a  large  business,"  Mr.  Stacpoole 
says  of  this  organization  in  his  popular  life  of  Villon, 
"  with  as  many  departments  as  a  New  York  store, 
and,  to  extend  the  simile,  its  chief  aim  and  object  was 
to  make  money.  Coining,  burglary,  highway  robbery, 
selling  indulgences  and  false  jewellery,  card-sharping, 
and  dice-playing  with  loaded  dice,  were  chief  among 
its   industries."      Mr.    Stacpoole  goes   on   to   tone   down 


100  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

this  catalogue  of  iniquity  with  the  explanation  that  the 
Coquillards  were,  after  all,  not  nearly  such  villains  as 
our  contemporary  milk-adulterators  and  sweaters  of 
women.  He  is  inclined  to  think  they  may  have  been  good 
fellows,  like  Robin  Hood  and  his  men  or  the  gentlemen 
of  the  road  in  a  later  century.  This  may  well  be,  but 
a  gang  of  Robin  Hoods,  infesting  a  hundred  taverns 
in  the  town  and  quarrelling  in  the  streets  over  loose 
women,  is  dangerous  company  for  an  impressionable 
young  man  who  had  never  been  taught  the  Shorter 
Catechism.  Paris,  even  in  the  twentieth  century,  is 
alleged  to  be  a  city  of  temptation.  Paris,  in  the  fifteenth 
century,  must  have  been  as  tumultuous  with  the  seven 
deadly  sins  as  the  world  before  the  Flood.  Joan  of 
Arc  had  been  burned  in  the  year  in  which  Villon  was 
born,  but  her  death  had  not  made  saints  of  the  students 
of  Paris.  Living  more  or  less  beyond  the  reach  of 
the  civil  law,  they  made  a  duty  of  riot,  and  counted 
insolence  and  wine  to  themselves  for  righteousness. 
Villon,  we  are  reminded,  had  good  influences  in  his 
life,  which  might  have  been  expected  to  moderate  the 
appeal  of  wildness  and  folly.  He  had  his  dear,  illiterate 
mother,  for  whom,  and  at  whose  request,  he  wrote  that 
unexpected  ballade  of  prayer  to  the  Mother  of  God. 
He  had,  too,  that  good  man  who  adopted  him,  Guillaume 
de  Villon,  chaplain  of  Saint  Benoist — 

mon  plus  que  pere  "> 

Maistre  Guillaume  de  Villon, 
Qui  m'a  este  plus  doux  que  mere  ; 

and  who  gave  him  the  name  that  he  has  made  immortal. 
That  he  was  not  altogether  unresponsive  to  these  good 
influences  is  shown  by  his  references  to  them  in  his 
Grand  Testament,  though  Stevenson  was  inclined  to  read 
into  the  lines  on  Guillaume  the  most  infernal  kind  of 
mockery  and  derision.  One  of  Villon's  bequests  to  the 
old  man,  it  will  be  remembered,  was  the  Rommant  du 
Pet   an    Diable,    which   Stevenson    refers    to    again   and 


VILLON :   THE  GENIUS  OF  THE  TAVERN    101 

again  as  an   "  improper  romance."     Mr.    Stacpoole  has 
done   a   service   to   English    readers   interested    in   Villon 
by  showing  that  the  Rommant  was  nothing  of  the  sort, 
but    was    a     little    epic — possibly    witty    enough — on    a 
notorious  conflict   between  the  students  and  civilians  of 
Paris.     One  may  accept  the  vindication  of  Villon's  good- 
ness of  heart,  however,  widiout   falling   in  at  all   points 
with  Mr.  Stacpoole's  tendency  to  justify  his  hero.     When, 
for  instance,  in  the  account  of  Villon's  only  known  act 
of   homicide,    the    fact   that    after    he    had   stabbed    the 
priest,   Scrmoise,  he  crushed  in   his  head  with  a   stone, 
is  used  to  prove  that  he  must  have  been  acting  on  the 
defensive,  because,   "  since  the  earliest  times,   the   stone 
is  the  weapon  used  by  man  to  repel  attack — chiefly  the 
attack  of  wolves   and  dogs  " — one   cannot   quite   repress 
a    sceptical    smile.       I    admit    that,    in    the    absence    of 
evidence,  we  have  no  right  to  accuse  Villon  of  deliberate 
murder.     But  it  is  the  absence  of  evidence  that  acquits 
him,  not  the  fact  that  he  killed  his  victim  with  a  stone 
as  well  as  a  dagger.      Nor  does  it   seem  toj  me  quite 
fair  to  blame,  as  Mr.  Stacpoole  does  by  implication,  the 
cold   and   beautiful   Katherine   de    Vaucelles   for    Villon's 
moral  downfall.      Katherine  de  Vaucelles — what  a  poem 
her  very  name   is  ! — may,  for  all  one   knows,  have  had 
the   best  of   reasons   for   sending  her   bully   to   beat   the 
poet  "  like  dirty  linen  on  the  washing-board."     We  do 
not  know,  and  it  is  better  to  leave  the  matter  a  mystery 
than  to  sentimentalize  like  Mr.  Stacpoole  : — 

Had  he  come  across  just  now  one  of  those  creative  women,  one 
of  those  women  who  by  the  alchemy  that  lives  alone  in  love  can 
bend  a  man's  character,  even  though  the  bending  had  been  ever 
so  little,  she  might  have  saved  him  from  the  catastrophe  towards 
which  he  was  moving,  and  which  took  place  in  the  following 
December. 

All  we  know  is  that  the  lady  of  miracles  did  not  arrive, 
and  that  in  her  absence  Villon  and  a  number  of  companion 
gallows-birds  occupied  the  dark  of  one  winter's  night 
in  robbing  the  chapel  of  the  College  de  Navarre.     This 


102  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 


was  in    1456,  and  not  long  afterwards   Villon  wrote  his 
Petit  Testament,  and  skipped  from  Paris. 

We  know  little  of  his  wanderings  in  the  next  five 
years,  nor  do  we  know  whether  the  greater  part  of 
them  was  spent  in  crimes  or  in  reputable  idleness.  Mr. 
Stacpoole  writes  a  chapter  on  his  visit  to  Charles  of 
Orleans,  but  there  are  few  facts  for  a  biographer  to 
go  upon  during  this  period.  Nothing  with  a  date 
happened  to  Villon  till  the  summer  of  1461,  when 
Thibault  d'Aussigny,  Bishop  of  Orleans,  for  some  cause 
or  other,  real  or  imaginary,  had  him  cast  into  a  pit 
so  deep  that  he  "  could  not  even  see  the  lightning  of 
a  thunderstorm,"  and  kept  him  there  for  three  months 
with  "  neither  stool  to  sit  nor  bed  to  lie  on,  and  nothing 
to  eat  but  bits  of  bread  flung  down  to  him  by  his 
gaolers."  Here,  during  his  three  months'  imprisonment 
in  the  pit,  he  experienced  all  that  bitterness  of  life 
which  makes  his  Grand  Testament  a  "  De  Profundis  " 
without  parallel  in  scapegrace  literature.  Here,  we  may 
imagine  with  Mr.  Stacpoole,  his  soul  grew  in  the  grace  of 
sufi"ering,  and  the  death-bells  began  to  bring  a  solemn 
music  among  the  joy-bells  of  his  earlier  follies.  He 
is  henceforth  the  companion  of  lost  souls.  He  is  the 
most  melancholy  of  cynics  in  the  kingdom  of  death. 
He  has  ever  before  him  the  vision  of  men  hanging  on 
gibbets.  He  has  all  the  hatreds  of  a  man  tortured 
and  haunted  and  old. 

Not  that  he  ever  entirely  resigns  his  carnality.  His 
only  complaint  against  the  flesh  is  that  it  perishes  like 
the  snows  of  last  year.  But  to  recognize  even  this  is 
to  have  begun  to  have  a  just  view  of  life.  He  knows 
that  in  the  tavern  is  to  be  found  no  continuing  city. 
He  becomes  the  servant  of  truth  and  beauty  as  he  writes 
the  most  revealing  and  tragic  satires  on  the  popula- 
tion of  the  tavern  in  the  world's  literature.  What  more 
horrible  portrait  exists  in  poetry  than  that  of  "  la  belle 
Heaulmi^re  "  grown  old,  as  she  contemplates  her  beauty 
turned    to    hideousness — her    once    fair    limbs    become 


VILLON :   THE  GENIUS  OF   THE  TAVERN   103 

"  speckled  like  sausages  "?  '-  La  Grosse  Margot  "  alone 
is  more  horrible,  and  her  bully  utters  his  and  her  doom 
in  the  last  three  awful  lines  of  the  ballade  which  links 
her  name  with  Villon's  : — 

Ordure  amons,  ordure  nous  aflfuyt  ; 
Nous  deffuyons  honneur,  il  nous  deffuyt, 
En  ce  bordeau,  ou  tenons  nostra  estat. 

But  there  is  more  than  the  truth  of  ugliness  in  these 
amazing  ballads  of  which  the  Grand  Testament  is  full. 
Villon  was  by  nature  a  worshipper  of  beauty.  The 
lament  over  the  defeat  of  his  dream  of  fair  lords  and 
ladies  by  the  reality  of  a  withered  and  dissatisfying 
world  runs  like  a  torment  through  his  verse.  No  one 
has  ever  celebrated  the  inevitable  passing  of  loveliness 
in  lovelier  verse  than  Villon  has  done  in  the  Ballade 
des  Dames  du  Temps  Jadis.  I  have  hleard  it  main- 
tained that  Rossetti  has  translated  the  radiant  beauty 
of  this  ballade  into  his  BaUad  of  Dead  Ladies.  I  cannot 
agree.      Even    his    beautiful    translation    of    the    refrain, 

But  where  are  the  snows  of  5'esteryear, 

seems  to  me  to  injure  simplicity  with  an  ornament,  and 
to  turn  natural  into  artificial  music.  Compare  the  operk- 
ing  lines  in  the  original  and  in  the  translation,  and  you 
will  see  the  difference  between  the  sincere  expression 
of  a  vision  and  the  beautiful  writing  of  an  exercise. 
Here  is  Villon's  beginning  : — 


*& 


Dictes-moy  ou,  n'en  quel  pays. 
Est  Flora,  la  belle  Romaine  ? 

Archipiade,  ne  Thais, 

Qui  fut  sa  coqsine  germaine  ? 

And  here   is   Rossetti's  jaunty  English  : — 

Tell  me  now  in  what  hidden  way  is 
Lady  Flora,  the  lovely  Roman  ? 

Where's  Hipparchia,  and  where  is  Thais, 
Neither  of  them  the  fairer  woman  ? 


104  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

One  sees  how  Rossetti  is  inclined  to  romanticize  that 
which  is  already  romantic  beyond  one's  dreams  in  its 
naked  and  golden  simplicity.  I  would  not  quarrel  with 
Rossetti's  version,  however,  if  it  had  not  been  often 
put  forward  as  an  example  of  a  translation  which  was 
equal  to  the  original.  It  is  certainly  a  wonderful  version 
if  we  compare  it  with  most  of  those  that  have  been  made 
from  Villon.  Mr.  Stacpoole's,  I  fear,  have  no  rivulets 
of  music  running  through  them  to  make  up  for  their 
want  of  prose  exactitude.  Admittedly,  however,  trans- 
lation of  Villon  is  difficult.  Some  of  his  most  beautiful 
poems  are  simple  as  catalogues  of  names,  and  the  secret 
of  their  beauty  is  a  secret  elusive  as  a  fragrance  borne 
on  the  wind.  Mr.  Stacpoole  may  be  congratulated  on 
his  courage  in  undertaking  an  impossible  task — a  task, 
moreover,  in  which  he  challenges  comparison  with 
Rossetti,  Swinburne,  and  Andrew, Lang.  His  book,  how- 
ever, is  meant  for  the  general  public  rather  than  for 
poets  and  scholars— at  least,  for  that  intelligent  portion 
of  the  general  public  which  is  interested  in  literature 
without  being  over-critical.  For  its  purpose  it  may  be 
recommended  as  an  interesting,  picturesque,  and  judicious 
book.  The  Villon  of  Stevenson  is  little  better  than  a 
criminal  monkey  of  genius.  The  Villon  of  Mr.  Stacpoole 
is  at  least  the  makings  of  a  man. 


X 
POPE 

Pope  is  a  poet  whose  very  admirers  belittle  him.  Mr. 
Saintsbury,  for  instance,  even  in  the  moment  of  inciting 
us  to  read  him,  observes  tliat  "  it  would  be  scarcely 
rash  to  say  that  there  is  not  an  original  thought, 
sentiment,  image,  or  example  of  any  of  the  other 
categories  of  poetic  substance  to  be  found  in  the  half 
a  hundred  thousand  verses  of  Pope."  And  he  has 
still  less  to  say  in  favour  of  Pope  as  a  man.  He 
denounces  him  for  "  rascality  "  and  goes  on  with  charac- 
teristic irresponsibility  to  suggest  that  "  perhaps  .  .  . 
there  is  a  natural  connection  between  the  two  kinds 
of  this  dexterity  of  fingering — that  of  the  artist  in 
words,  and  that  of  the  pickpocket  or  the  forger." 
If  Pope  had  been  a  contemporary,  Mr.  Saintsbury,  I 
imagine,  would  have  stunned  him  with  a  huge  mattock 
of  adjectives.  As  it  is,  he  seems  to  be  in  two  minds 
whether  to  bury  or  to  praise  him.  Luckily,  he  has 
tempered  his  moral  sense  with  his  sense  of  humour, 
and  so  comes  to  the  happy  conclusion  that  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  when  we  read  or  read  about  Pope,  "  some  of 
the  proofs  which  are  most  damning  morally,  positively 
increase  one's  aesthetic  delight." 

One  is  interested  in  Pope's  virtues  as  a  poet  and 
his  vices  as  a  man  almost  equally.  It  is  his  virtues 
as  a  man  and  his  vices  as  a  poet  that  are  depressing. 
He  is  usually  at  his  worst  artistically  when  he  is  at 
his  best  morally.  He  achieves  wit  through  malice: 
he  achieves  only  rhetoric  through  virtue.  It  is  not 
that   one   wishes  he   had   been  a   bad  son   or  a   Uriah 

105 


106  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Heep  in  his  friendships.  It  is  pleasant  to  remember 
the  pleasure  he  gave  his  mother  by  allowing  her  to 
copy  out  parts  of  his  translation  of  the  Iliad,  and 
one  respects  him  for  refusing  a  pension  of  £300  a 
year  out  of  the  secret  service  money  from  his  friend 
Craggs.  But  one  wishes  that  he  had  put  neither  his 
fiHal  piety  nor  his  friendship  into  writing.  Mr. 
Saintsbury,  I  see,  admires  "  the  masterly  and  delightful 
craftsmanship  in  words  "  of  the  tribute  to  Craggs  ; 
but  then  Mr.  Saintsbury  also  admires  the  Elegy  on 
an  U nfortunate  Lady — a  mere  attitude  in  verse,  as 
chill  as  a  weeping  angel  in  a  graveyard. 

Pope's  attractiveness  is  less  that  of  a  real  man  than 
of  an  inhabitant  of  Lilliput,  where  it  is  a  matter 
of  no  importance  whether  or  not  one  lives  in  obedience 
to  the  Ten  Commandments.  .We  can  regard  him  with 
amusement  as  a  liar,  a  forger,  a  glutton,  and  a 
slanderer  of  his  kind.  If  his  letters  are  the  dullest 
letters  ever  written  by  a  wit,  it  is  because  he  reveals 
in  them  not  his  real  vices  but  his  imaginary  virtues. 
They  only  become  interesting  when  we  know  the  secret 
history  of  his  life  and  read  them  as  the  moralizings  of 
a  doll  Pecksniff.  Historians  of  literature  often  assert — 
mistakenly,  I  think — that  Pliny's  letters  are  dull,  because 
they  are  merely  the  literary  exercises  of  a  man  over- 
conscious  of  his  virtues.  But  Pliny's  virtues,  however 
tip-tilted,  were  at  least  real.  Pope's  letters  are  the 
literary  exercises  of  a  man  platitudinizing  about  virtues 
he  did  not  possess.  They  have  an  impersonality  like 
that  of  the  leading  articles  in  The  Times.  Phey  have 
all  the  qualities  of  the  essay  except  intimate  confession. 
They  are  irrelevant  scrawls  which  might  as  readily 
have  been  addressed  to  one  correspondent  as  another. 
So  much  so  is  this,  that  when  Pope  published  them, 
he  altered  the  names  of  the  recipients  of  some  of 
them  so  as  to  make  it  appear  that  they  were  written 
to  famous  persons  when,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  they  were 
written  to  private  and  little -known  friends. 


POPE  107 

The  story  of  the  way  in  which  he  tampered  with 
his  letters  and  arranged  for  their  "  unauthorized " 
publication  by  a  pirate  publisher  is  one  of  the  most 
amazing  in  the  history  of  forgery.  It  was  in  reference 
to  this  that  Whitwell  Elwin  declared  that  Pope 
*'  displayed  a  complication  of  imposture,  degradation,  and 
effrontery  which  can  only  be  paralleled  in  the  lives 
of  professional  forgers  and  swindlers."  When  he 
published  his  correspondence  with  iW.ychcrley,  his  con- 
temporaries were  amazed  that  the  boyish  Pope  should 
have  written  with  such  an  air  of  patronage  to  the 
aged  .Wycherley  and  that  Wycherley  should  have 
suffered  it.  We  know,  now,  however,  that  the  corre- 
spondence is  only  in  part  genuine,  and  that  Pope  used 
portions  of  his  correspondence  with  Caryll  and  published 
them  as  though  they  had  been  addressed  to  Wycherley. 
Wycherley  had  remonstrated  with  Pope  on  the  extrav- 
agant compliments  he  paid  him  :  Pope  had  remonstrated 
with  Caryll  on  similar  grounds.  In  the  Wycherley 
correspondence,  Pope  omits  Wycherley's  remonstrance 
to  him  and  publishes  his  own  remonstrance  to  Caryll 
as  a  letter  from  himself  to  Wycherley. 

From  that  time  onwards  Pope  spared  no  effort  in 
getting  his  correspondence  "  surreptitiously  "  published. 
He  engaged  a  go-between,  a  disreputable  actor 
disguised  as  a  clergyman,  to  approach  Curll,  the 
publisher,  with  an  offer  of  a  stolen  collection  of  letters, 
and,  when  the  book  was  announced,  he  attacked  Curll 
as  a  villain,  and  procured  a  friend  in  the  House  of 
Lords  to  move  a  resolution  that  Curll  should  be  brought 
before  the  House  on  a  charge  of  breach  of  privilege, 
one  of  the  letters  (it  was  stated)  having  been  written 
to  Pope  by  a  peer,  Curll  took  a  number  of  copies 
of  the  book  with  him  to  the  Lords,  and  it  was  discovered 
that  no  such  letter  was  included.  But  the  advertisement 
was  a  noble  one.  Unfortunately,  even  a  man  of  genius 
could  not  devise  elaborate  schemes  of  this  kind  without 
ultimately   falling   under   suspicion,  and   Curll   wrote   a 


108  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

narrative  of  the  events  ,  which  resulted  in  seriously 
discrediting   Pope.  i 

Pope  was  surely  one  of  the  least  enviable  authors 
who  ever  lived.  He  had  fame  and  fortune  and  friends. 
But  he  had  not  the  constitution  to  enjoy  his  fortune, 
and  in  friendship  he  had  not  the  gift  of  fidelity.  He 
secretly  published  his  correspondence  with  Swift  and 
then  set  up  a  pretence  that  Swift  had  been  the  culprit. 
He  earned  from  Bolingbroke  in  the  end  a  hatred  that 
pursued  him  in  the  grave.  He  was  always  begging 
Swift  to  go  and  live  with  him  at  Twickenham.  But 
Swift  found  even  a  short  visit  trying.  "  Two  sick 
friends  never  did  well  together,"  he  w^rote  in  1727, 
and  he  has  left  us  verses  descriptive  of  the  miseries  of 
great  wits  in  each  other's  company :  — 

Pope  has  the  talent  well  to  speak, 

But  not  to  reach  the  ear  ; 
His  loudest  voice  is  low  and  weak. 

The  Dean  too  deaf  to  hear. 

Awhile  they  on  each  other  look. 

Then  different  studies  choose  ; 
The  Dean  sits  plodding  o'er  a  book, 

Pope  walks  and  courts  the  muse. 

*'  Mr.  Pope,"  he  grumbled  some  years  later,  "  can 
neither  eat  nor  drink,  loves  to  be  alone,  and  has  always 
some  poetical  scheme  in  his  head."  Swift,  luckily,  stayed 
in  Dublin  and  remained  Pope's  friend.  Lady  Mary 
Wortley  Montagu  went  to  Twickenham  and  became 
Pope's  enemy.  The  reason  seems  to  have  been  that 
he  was  more  eager  for  an  exchange  of  compliments 
than  for  friendship.  He  affected  the  attitude  of  a 
man  in  love,  when  Lady  Mary  saw  in  him  only  a 
monkey  in  love.  He  is  even  said  to  have  thrown  his 
little  makeshift  of  a  body,  in  its  canvas  bodice  and 
its  three  pairs  of  stockings,  at  her  feet,  with  the  result 
that  she  burst  out  laughing.  Pope  took  his  revenge 
in    the    Epistle    to    Martha    Blount^    where,    describing 


POPE  109 

Lady    Mary   as  Sappho,    he    declared   of    another   lady 

that    her    different    aspects    agreed    as    ill    with    each 

other — 

As  Sappho's  diamonds  with  her  dirty  smock  ; 
Or  Sappho  at  her  toilet's  greasy  task 
With  Sappho  fragrant  at  an  evening  mask  ; 
So  morning  insects,  that  in  muck  begun, 
Shine,  buzz,  and  fiy-blow  in  the  evening  sun. 

His  relations  with  his  contemporaries  were  too  often 
begun  in  compliments  only  to  end  in  abuse  of  this  kind. 
Even  while  he  was  on  good  terms  with  them,  he  was 
frequently  doing  them  ill  turns.  Thus,  he  persuaded 
a  publisher  to  get  Dennis  to  write  abusively  of  Addison's 
Cato  in  order  that  he  might  have  an  excuse  in  his 
turn  for  writing  abusively  of  Dennis,  apparently 
vindicating  Addison  but  secretly  taking  a  revenge  of 
his  own.  Addison  was  more  embarrassed  than  pleased 
by  so  sav^age  a  defence,  and  hastened  to  assure  Dennis 
that  he  had  had  nothing  to  do  with  it.  Addison  also 
gave  offence  to  Pope  by  his  too  judicious  praise  of 
Tlie  Rape  of  the  Lock  and  the  translation  of  the  Iliad. 
Thus  began  the  maniacal  suspicion  of  Addison,  which 
was  expressed  with  the  genius  of  venom  in  the  Epistle 
to  Dr.  Arbuthnot. 

There  was  never  a  poet  whose  finest  work  needs 
such  a  running  commentary  of  discredit  as  Pope's. 
He  may  be  said,  indeed,  to  be  the  only  great  poet  in 
reading  whom  the  commentary  is  as  necessary  as  the 
text.  One  can  enjoy  Shakespeare  or  Shelley  without 
a  note :  one  is  inclined  even  to  resent  the  intrusion  of 
the  commentator  into  the  upper  regions  of  poetry.  But 
Pope's  verse  is  a  guide  to  his  age  and  the  incidents  of 
his  waspish  existence,  lacking  a  key  to  which  one  misses 
three-fourths  of  the  entertainment.  The  Dunciad 
without  footnotes  is  one  of  the  obscurest  poems  in 
existence  :  with  footnotes  it  becomes  a  perfect  epic  of 
literary  entomology.  And  it  is  the  same  with  at  least 
half  of  his  work.     Thus,  in  the  Imitations  of  Horace, 


110  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

SL  reference  to  Russell  tells  us  little  till  we  read  in  a 
delightful    footnote  :  >  >  , 

There  was  a  Lord  Russell  who,  by  living  too  luxuriously,  had 
quite  spoiled  his  constitution.  He  did  not  love  sport,  but  used 
to  go  out  with  his  dogs  every  day  only  to  hunt  for  an  appetite. 
If  he  felt  anything  of  that,  he  would  cry  out,  "  Oh,  I  have  found 
it!"  turn  short  round  and  ride  home  again,  though  they  were  in 
the  midst  of  the  finest  chase.  It  was  this  lord  who,  when  he  met 
a  beggar,  and  was  entreated  by  him  to  give  him  something  because 
he  was  almost  famished  with  hunger,  called  him  a  "  happy  dog." 

There  may  have  been  a  case  for  neglecting  Pope  before 
Mr.  Elwin  and  Mr.  Courthope  edited  and  annotated 
him — though  he  had  been  edited  well  before — but  their 
monumental  edition  has  made  him  of  all  English  poets 
one   of  the  most  incessantly  entertaining.  ■ 

Pope,  however,  is  a  charmer  in  himself.  His  venom 
has  graces.  He  is  a  stinging  insect,  but  of  how 
brilliant  a  hue  \  There  are  few  satires  in  literature 
richer  in  the  daintiness  of  malice  than  the  Epistle  to 
Martha  Blount  and  the  Epistle  to  Dr.  Arbuthnoi.  The 
"  characters  "  of  women  in  the  former  are  among  the 
most  precious  of  those  railleries  of  sex  in  which  mankind 
has  always  loved  to  indulge.  The  summing-up  of  the 
perfect  woman  : 

And  mistress  of  herself,  though  china  fall, 

is  itself  perfect  in  its  wit.     And  the  fickle  lady,  Narcissa, 
is    a  portrait   in   porcelain  : 

Narcissa's  nature,  tolerably  mild, 

To  make  a  wash,  would  hardly  stew  a  child  ; 

Has  even  been  proved  to  grant  a  lover's  prayer. 

And  paid  a  tradesman  once,  to  make  him  stare  ;  .  .  . 

Now  deep  in  Taylor  and  the  Book  of  Martyrs, 

Now  drinking  citron  with  his  Grace  and  Chartres  ; 

Now  conscience  chills  her  and  now  passion  burns  ; 

And  atheism  and  religion  take  their  turns  ; 

A  very  heathen  in  the  carnal  part. 

Yet  still  a  sad,  good  Christian  at  the  heart. 

The  study  of  Chloe,  who  "  wants  a  heart,"  is  equally 
delicate    and   witty  : 


POPE  111 

Virtue  she  finds  too  painful  an  endeavour. 

Content  to  dwell  in  decencies  for  ever — 

So  very  reasonable,  so  unmoved. 

As  never  yet  to  love,  or  to  be  loved. 

She,  while  her  lover  pants  upon  her  breast, 

Can  mark  the  figures  on  an  Indian  chest ; 

And  when  she  sees  her  friend  in  deep  despair, 

Observes  how  much  a  chintz  exceeds  mohair  !  .  .  . 

Would  Chloe  know  if  you're  alive  or  dead  ? 

She  bids  her  footman  put  it  in  her  head. 

Chloe  is  prudent— would  you  too  be  wise  ? 

Then  never  break  your  heart  when  Chloe  dies. 

The  Epistle  to  Dr.  Arbuthnot  is  still  more  dazzling. 
The  venom  is  passionate  without  ever  ceasing  to  be 
witty.  Pope  has  composed  a  masterpiece  of  his  vanities 
and  hatreds.  The  characterizations  of  Addison  as 
Atticus,  and  of  Lord  Hervey  as  Sporus  : 

Sporus,  that  mere  white  curd  of  ass's  milk — 

Sporus,  "  the  bug  with  gilded  wings  " — are  portraits 
one  may  almost  call  beautiful  in  their  bitter  phrasing. 
There  is  nothing  make-believe  here  as  there  is  in  the 
virtue  of  the  letters.  This  is  Pope's  confession,  the 
image  of  his  soul.  Elsewhere  in  Pope  the  accomplish- 
ment is  too  often  rhetorical,  though  The  Rape  of  the 
Lock  is  as  delicate  in  artifice  as  a  French  fairy-tale, 
the  Dunciad  an  amusing  assault  of  a  major  Lilliputian 
on  minor  Lilliputicms,  and  the  Essay  on  Criticism — 
what  a  regiment  of  witty  lines  to  be  written  by  a 
youth  of  twenty  or  twenty-one  !• — much  nearer  being 
a  great  essay  in  verse  than  is  generally  admitted  now- 
adays. As  for  the  Essay  on  Alan,  one  can  read  it 
more  than  once  only  out  of  a  sense  of  duty.  Pope 
has  nothing  to  tell  us  that  we  want  to  know  about 
man  except  in  so  far  as  he  dislikes  him.  We  praise 
him  as  the  poet  who  makes  remarks — as  the  poet, 
one  might  almost  say,  who  makes  faces.  It  is  when 
he  sits  in  the  scorner's  chair,  whether  in  good  humour 
or  in  bad,  that  he  is  the  little  lord  of  versifiers. 


XI 
JAMES    ELROY    FLECKER 

James  Elroy  Flecker  died  in  January  1915,  having 
added  at  least  one  poem  to  the  perfect  anthology  of 
English  verse.  Probably  his  work  contains  a  good 
deal  that  is  permanent  besides  this.  But  one  is  confident 
at  least  of  the  permanence  of  The  Old  Ships.  Readers 
coming  a  thousand  years  hence  upon  the  beauty,  the 
romance  and  the  colour  of  this  poem  will  turn  eagerly, 
one  imagines,  in  search  of  other  work  from  the  same 
pen.  This  was  the  flower  of  the  poet's  genius.  It 
was  the  exultant  and  original  speech  of  one  who  was 
in  a  great  measure  the  seer  of  other  men's  visions. 
Flecker  was  much  given  to  the  translation  of  other 
poets,  and  he  did  not  stop  at  translating  their  words. 
He  translated  their  imagination  also  into  careful  verse. 
He  was  one  of  those  poets  whose  genius  is  founded 
in  the  love  of  literature  more  than  in  the  love  of 
life.  He  seems  less  an  interpreter  of  the  earth  than 
one  who  sought  after  a  fantastic  vi^rld  which  had 
been  created  by  Swinburne  and  the  Parnassians  and 
the  old  painters  and  the  tellers  of  the  Arabian  Nights. 
"  He  began,"  Mr.  J.  C.  Squire  has  said,  "by  being 
more  interested  in  his  art  than  in  himself."  And  all 
but  a  score  or  so  of  his  poems  suggest  that  this  was 
his  way  to  the  last.  He  was  one  of  those  for  whom 
the  visible  world  exists.  But  it  existed  for  him  less  in 
nature  than  in  art.  He  does  not  give  one  the 
impression  of  a  poet  who  observed  minutely  and 
delightedly  as  Mr.  .W.  H.  Davies  observes.  His  was 
a  painted  world  inhabited  by  a  number  of  chosen  and 

112 


JAMES  ELROY  FLECKER  113 

exquisite  images.  He  found  the  real  world  by  com- 
parison disappointing.  "  He  confessed,"  we  are  told, 
**  that  he  had  not  greatly  liked  the  East — always 
excepting,  of  course,  Greece."  This  was  almost  a 
necessity  of  his  genius  ;  and  it  is  interesting  to  see 
how  in  some  of  his  later  work  his  imagination  is  feeling 
its  way  back  from  the  world  of  illusion  to  the  world 
of  real  things — from  Bagdad  and  Babylon  to  England. 
His  poetry  does  not  as  a  rule  touch  the  heart  ;  but 
in  Oak  and  Olive  and  Briimana  liis  spectatorial  sensuous- 
ness  at  last  breaks  down  and  the  cry  of  the  exile 
moves  us  as  in  an  intimate  letter  from  a  friend  since 
dead.  Those  are  not  mere  rhetorical  reproaches  to 
the   "  traitor  pines  "  which 

sang  what  life  has  found 
The  falsest  of  fair  tales  ; 

which  had   murmured   of —  ' 

older  seas 
That  beat  on  vaster  sands. 


and  of- 


lands 
Where  blaze  the  unimaginable  flowers 


It  was  as  though  disillusion  had  given  an  artist  a  soul. 
And  when  the  war  came  it  found  him,  as  he  lay  dying  of 
consumption  in  Switzerland,  a  poet  not  merely  of  manly 
but  of  martial  utterance.  The  Burial  in  England  is 
perhaps  too  much  of  an  ad  hoc  call  to  be  great 
poetry.  But  it  has  many  noble  and  beautiful  lines  and 
is  certainly  of  a  different  world  from  his  mediocre 
version  of  God  Save  the  King. 

At  the  same  time,  I  do  not  wish  to  suggest  that  his 
poetry  of  illusion  is  the  less  important  part  of  his 
work.  The  perfection  of  his  genius  is  to  be  sought, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  in  his  romantic  eastern  work,  such 
as    The  Ballad  of  Iskander,   A  Miracle   of   Bethlehem, 

3 


114  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Gates  of  Damascus,  and  Bryan  of  Brittany.  The  false, 
fair  tale  of  the  East  had,  as  it  were,  released  him 
from  mere  flirtation  with  the  senses  into  the  world  of 
the  imagination.  Of  human  passions  he  sang  little. 
He  wrote  oftener  of  amorousness  than  of  love,  as  in 
The  Ballad  of  the  Student  of  the  South.  His  passion 
for  fairy  tales,  his  amorousness  of  the  East,  stirred  his 
imagination  from  idleness  among  superficial  fancies  into 
a  brilliant  ardour.  It  was  these  things  that  roused 
him  to  a  nice  extravagance  with  those  favourite  words 
and  colours  and  images  upon  which  Mr.  Squire 
comments  :        i 

There  are  words,  just  as  there  are  images,  which  he  was  especially 
fond  of  using.  There  are  colours  and  metals,  blue  and  red,  silver 
and  gold,  which  are  present  everywhere  in  his  work  ;  the  progresses 
of  the  sun  (he  was  always  a  poet  of  the  sunlight  rather  than  a  poet 
of  the  moonlight)  were  a  continual  fascination  to  him  ;  the  images  of 
Fire,  of  a  ship,  and  of  an  old  white-bearded  man  recur  frequently 
in  his  poems. 

Mr.  Squire  contends  justly  enough  that  in  spite  of 
this  Flecker  is  anything  but  a  monotonous  poet.  But 
the  image  of  a  ship  was  almost  an  obsession  \vith  him. 
It  was  his  favourite  toy.  Often  it  is  a  silver  ship. 
In  the  blind  man's  vision  in  the  time  of  Christ  even 
the  Empires  of  the  future  are  seen  sailing  like  ships. 
The  keeper  of  the  .West  Gate  of  Damascus  sings  of 
the  sea  beyond  the  sea  : 

when  no  wind  breathes  or  ripple  stirs, 
And   there  on   Roman  ships,   they   say,   stand   rows   of  metal 
mariners. 

Those  lines  are  worth  noting  for  the  way  in  which; 
they  suggest  how  much  in  the  nature  of  toys  were 
the  images  with  which  Flecker's  imagination  was 
haunted.  His  world  was  a  world  of  nursery  ships  and 
nursery  caravans. 

"  Haunted  "  is,  perhaps,  an  exaggeration.  His 
attitude    is    too    impassive    for    that.      He    works    with 


JAMES  ELROY  FLECKER  115 

the  deliberateness  of  a  prose-writer.  He  is  occasionally 
even  prosaic  in  the  bad  sense,  as  when  he  uses  the 
word   "  meticulously,"  or  makes  his  lost  mariners  say  : 

How  striking  like  that  boat  were  we 

In  the  days,  sweet  days,  when  we  put  to  sea. 

That  he  was  a  poet  of  the  fancy  rather  than  of  the 
imagination  also  tended  to  keep  his  poetry  near  the 
ground.  His  love  of  the  ballad-design  and  "  the  good 
coloured  things  of  Earth"  was  tempered  by  a  kind  of 
infidel  humour  in  his  use  of  them.  His  ballads  are 
the  ballads  of  a  brilliant  dilettante,  not  of  a  man  who 
is  expressing  his  whole  heart  and  soul  and  faith,  as 
the  old  ballad-writers  were.  In  the  result  he  walked 
a  golden  pavement  rather  than  mounted  into  the  golden 
air.  He  was  an  artist  in  ornament,  in  decoration.  Like 
the  Queen  in  the  Queen's  Song,  he  would  immortalize 
the  ornament  at  the  cost  of  slaying  the  soul. 

Of  all  recent  poets  of  his  kind.  Flecker  is  the  most 
successful.  The  classical  tradition  of  poetry  has  been 
mocked  and  mutilated  by  many  of  the  noisy  young 
in  the  last  few  years.  Flecker  was  a  poet  who 
preserved  the  ancient  balance  in  days  in  which  want 
of  balance  was  looked  on  as  a  sign  of  genius.  That 
he  was  what  is  called  a  minor  poet  cannot  be  denied,  but 
he  was  the  most  beautiful  of  recent  minor  poets.  His 
book,  indeed,  is  a  treasury  of  beauty  rare  in  these  days. 
Of  that  beauty,  The  Old  Ships  is,  as  I  have  said,  the 
splendid  example.  And,  as  it  is  foolish  to  offer  any- 
thing except  a  poet's  best  as  a  specimen  of  his  work, 
one  has  no  alternative  but  to  turn  again  to  those 
gorgeously-coloured    verses  which   begin  : 

I  have  seen  old  ships  sail  like  swans  asleep 
Beyond  the  village  which  men  still  call  Tyre, 
With  leaden  age  o'ercargoed,  dipping  deep 
For  Famagusta  and  the  hidden  sun 
That  rings  black  Cyprus  with  a  lake  of  fire  ; 
And  all  those  ships  were  certainly  so  old — 
Who  knows  how  oft  with  squat  and  noisy  gun, 


116  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

Questing  brown  slaves  or  Syrian  oranges. 

The  pirate  Genoese 

Hell-raked  them  till  they  rolled 

Blood,  water,  fruit  and  corpses  up  the  hold. 

But  now  through  friendly  seas  they  softly  run. 

Painted  the  mid-sea  blue  or  shore-sea  green. 

Still  patterned  with  the  vine  and  grapes  in  gold. 

That  is  the  summary  and  the  summit  of  Flecker's 
genius.  But  the  rest  of  his  verse,  too,  is  the  work  of  a 
true  and  delightful  poet,  a  faithful  priest  of  literature, 
an  honest  craftsman  with  words. 


^1 


XII 
TURGENEV 

Mr.  Edward  Garnett  has  recently  collected  his  pre- 
faces to  the  novels  and  stories  of  Turgenev,  and  re- 
fashioned them  into  a  book  in  praise  of  the  genius  of 
the  most  charming  of  Russian  authors.  I  am  afraid 
the  word  "  charming  "  has  lost  so  much  of  its  stamp 
and  brightness  with  use  as  to  have  become  almost  mean- 
ingless. But  we  apply  it  to  Turgenev  in  its  fullest 
sense.  We  call  him  charming  as  Pater  called  Athens 
charming.  He  is  one  of  those  authors  whose  books 
we  love  because  they  reveal  a  personality  sensitive, 
affectionate,  pitiful.  There  are  some  persons  who,  when 
they  come  into  a  room,  immediately  make  us  feel  happier. 
Turgenev  seems  to  "  come  into  the  room  "  in  his  books 
with  just  such  a  welcome  presence.  That  is  why  I 
wish  Mr.  Garnett  had  made  his  book  a  biographical, 
as    well    as    a   critical,    study. 

He  quotes  Turgenev  as  saying  :  "  All  my  life  is  in 
my  books."  Still,  there  are  a  great  many  facts  recorded 
about  him  in  the  letters  and  reminiscences  of  those  who 
knew  him  (and  he  was  known  in  half  the  countries  of 
Europe),  out  of  which  we  can  construct  a  portrait.  One 
finds  in  the  Life  of  Sir  Charles  Dilkc,  for  instance,  that 
Dilke  considered  Turgenev  "  in  the  front  rank  "  as  a 
conversationalist.  This  opinion  interested  one  all 
the  more  because  one  had  come  to  think  of  Turgenev 
as  something  of  a  shy  giant.  I  remember,  too,  read- 
ing in  some  French  book  a  description  of  Turgenev 
as  a  strange  figure  in  the  literary  circles  of  Paris — a 
large  figure  with  a  curious  chastity  of  mind  who  seemed 

H7 


118  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

bewildered   by  some  of  the  barbarous  jests  of  civilized 
men  of  genius. 

There  are,  indeed,  as  I  have  said,  plenty  of  suggestions 
for  a  portrait  of  Turgenev,  quite  apart  from  his  novels. 
Mr.  Garnett  refers  to  some  of  them  in  two  excellent 
biographical  chapters.  He  reminds  us,  for  example,  of 
the  immense  generosity  of  Turgenev  to  his  contemporaries 
and  rivals,  as  when  he  introduced  the  work  of  Tolstoy 
to  a  French  editor.  "  Listen,"  said  Turgenev.  "  Here 
is  '  copy  '  for  your  paper  of  an  absolutely  first-rate 
kind.  This  means  that  I  am  not  its  author.  The 
master — for  he  is  a  real  master — is  almost  unknown  in 
France  ;  but  I  assure  you,  on  my  soul  and  conscience, 
that  I  do  not  consider  myself  worthy  to  unloose  the 
latchet  of  his  shoes."  The  letter  he  addressed  to  Tolstoy 
from  his  death-bed,  urging  him  to  return  from  propaganda 
to  literature,  is  famous,  but  it  is  a  thing  to  which  one 
always  returns  fondly  as  an  example  of  the  noble  dis- 
interestedness of  a  great  man  of  letters.  "  I  cannot 
recover,"    Turgenev    wrote  : — 

That  is  out  of  the  question.  I  am  writing  to  you  specially  to 
say  how  glad  I  am  to  be  your  contemporary,  and  to  express  my 
last  and  sincere  request.  My  friend,  return  to  literary  activity  ! 
That  gift  came  to  5'ou  whence  comes  all  the  rest.  Ah,  how  happy 
I  should  be  if  I  could  think  my  request  would  have  an  effect  on 
you  !  .  .  .  I  can  neither  walk,  nor  eat,  nor  sleep.  It  is  wearisome 
even  to  repeat  it  all  !  My  friend — great  writer  of  our  Russian 
land,  listen  to  my  request !  .  .  .  I  can  write  no  more ;  I  am 
tired. 

One  sometimes  wonders  how  Tolstoy  and  Dostoevsky 
could  ever  have  quarrelled  with  a  friend  of  so  beautiful 
a  character  as  Turgenev.  Perhaps  it  was  that  there 
was  something  barbarous  and  brutal  in  each  of  them 
that  was  intolerant  of  his  almost  feminine  refinement. 
They  were  both  men  of  action  in  literature,  militant, 
and  by  nature  propagandist.  And  probably  Turgenev 
was  as  impatient  with  the  faults  of  their  strength  as 
they   were   with   the  faults   of   his   weakness.      He   was 


TURGENEV  119 


a  man  whom  it  was  possible  to  disgust.  Though  he 
was  Zola's  friend,  he  comijlaiiicd  that  L'Assomnioir  left 
a  bad  taste  in  the  mouth.  Similarly,  he  discovered 
something  almost  Sadistic  in  the  manner  in  which 
Dostoevsky  let  his  imagination  dwell  on  scenes  of  cruelty 
and  horror.  And  he  was  as  strongly  repelled  by 
Dostoevsky 's  shrieking  Pan-Slavism  as  by  his  sensation- 
alism among  horrors.  One  can  guess  exactly  the  frame 
of  mind  he  was  in  when,  in  the  course  of  an  argument 
with  Dostoevsky,  he  said  :  "  You  see,  I  consider  myself 
a  German."  This  has  been  quoted  against  Turgenev 
as  though  he  meant  it  literally,  and  as  though  it  were 
a  confession  of  denationalization.  His  words  were  more 
subtle  than  that  in  their  irony.  What  they  meant  was 
simply  :  "  If  to  be  a  Russian  is  to  be  a  bigot,  like 
most  of  you  Pan-Slav  enthusiasts,  then  I  am  no  Russian, 
but  a  European."  Has  he  not  put  the  whole  gospel 
of  Nationalism  in  half  a  dozen  sentences  in  Rudin?  He 
refused,  however,  to  adopt  along  with  his  Nationalism 
the  narrowness  with  which  it  has  been  too  often 
associated. 

This  refusal  was  what  destroyed  his  popularity  in 
Russia  in  his  lifetime.  It  is  because  of  this  refusal  that 
he  has  been  pursued  with  belittlement  by  one  Russian 
writer  after  another  since  his  death.  He  had  that  sense 
of  truth  which  always  upsets  the  orthodox.  This  sense 
of  truth  applied  to  the  portraiture  of  his  contemporaries 
was  felt  like  an  insult  in  those  circles  of  mixed  idealism 
and  make-believe,  the  circles  of  the  political  partisans. 
A  great  artist  may  be  a  member — and  an  enthusiastic 
member — of  a  political  party,  but  in  his  art  he  cannot 
become  a  political  partisan  without  ceasing  to  be  an 
artist.  In  his  novels,  Turgenev  regarded  it  as  his  life- 
work  to  portray  Russia  truthfully,  not  to  paint  and  powder 
and  "  prettify  "  it  for  show  purposes,  and  the  result 
was  an  outburst  of  fury  on  the  part  of  those  who  were 
asked  to  look  at  themselves  as  real  people  instead  of 
as  the  master-pieces  of  a  professional  flatterer.      Wlieq 


120  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Fathers  and  Children  Kvas  published  in  1862,  the  only 
people  who  were  pleased  were  the  enemies  of  everything 
in  which  Turgenev  believed.  "  I  received  congratula- 
tions," he  wrote, 

almost  caresses,  from  people  of  the  opposite  camp,  from  enemies. 
This  confused  me,  woimded  me  ;  but  my  conscience  did  not  reproach 
me.  I  knew  very  well  I  had  carried  out  honestly  the  type  I  had 
sketched,  carried  it  out  not  only  without  prejudice,  but  positively 
with  sympathy. 

This    is    bound    to    be    the    fate    of   every    artist    who 
takes    his    political    party   or    his    church,    or    any    other 
propagandist  group  to  which  he  belongs,  as  his  subject. 
He  is  a  painter,  not  a  vindicator,  and  he  is  compelled 
to  exhibit  numerous  crooked  features  and  faults  in  such 
a  way  as  to  wound  the  vanity  of  hijs  friends  and  delight 
the  malice  of  his  enemies.     Artistic  truth  is  as  different 
from  propagandist  tioith  as  daylight  from  limelight,  and 
the  artist  will  always  be  hated   by  the  propagandist  as 
worse  than  an  enemy — b.  treacherous  friend.      Turgenev 
deliberately  accepted  as  his  life-work  a  course  which  could 
only  lead  to  the  miseries  of  being  misunderstood.     When 
one  thinks  of  the  long  years  of  denunciation  and  hatred 
he    endured    for    the   sake    of    his    art,    one    cannot    but 
regard  him    as   one  of   the   heroic   figures   of   the   nine- 
teenth century.     "  He  has,"  Mr.  Garnett  tells  us,  "  been 
accused   of   timidity   and   cowardice   by   uncompromising 
Radicals  and  Revolutionaries.    .   -.    .    In  an  access  of  self- 
reproach  he  once  declared  that  his  character  was  com- 
prised in  one  word — '  poltroon  !  *  "     He  showed  neither 
timidity  nor  cowardice,  however,  in  his  devotion  to  truth. 
His  first  and  last  advice  to  young  writers,  Mr.  Garnett 
declares,  was  :     "  You   need  truth,   remorseless  truth,   as 
regards    your   own    sensations."      And    if    Turgenev   was 
remorseless  in  nothing  else,  he  was  remorseless  in  this — 
truth  as  regards  both  his  own  sensations  and  the  sensa- 
tions   of    his    contemporaries.       He    seems,    if    we    may 
judge    from    a    sentence    he    wrote    about    Fathers    and 
Children,  to  have  regarded  himself  almost  as  the  first 


TURGENEV  121 


realist.  "  It  was  a  new  method,"  he  said,  "  as  well  as 
a  new  type  I  introduced — that  of  Realizing  instead  of 
Idealizing."  His  claim  has,  at  least,  this  truth  in  it  : 
he  was  the  first  artist  to  apply  the  realistic  method 
to  a  world  seething  with  ideas  and  with  political  and 
philosophical  unrest.  His  adoption  of  the  reaHstic 
method,  however,  was  the  result  of  necessity  no  less 
than  of  choice.  He  "  simply  did  not  know  how  to  work 
otherwise,"  as  he  said.  He  had  not  the  sort  of  imagina- 
tion that  can  invent  men  and  Avomcn  easily.  He  had 
always  to  draw  from  the  life.  "  I  ought  to  confess," 
he  once  wrote,  "  that  I  never  attempted  to  create  a 
type  without  having,  not  an  idea,  but  a  living  person, 
in  whom  the  various  elements  were  harmonized  together, 
to  work  from.  I  have  always  needed  some  groundwork 
on  which  I  could  tread  firmly." 

When  one  has  praised  Turgenev,  however,  for  the 
beauty  of  his  character  and  the  beautiful  truth  of  his 
art,  one  remembers  that  he,  too,  was  human  and  there- 
fore less  than  perfect.  His  chief  failing  was,  perhaps, 
that  of  all  the  great  artists,  he  was  the  most  lacking 
in  exuberance.  That  is  why  he  began  to  be  scorned 
in  a  world  which  rated  exuberance  higher  than  beauty 
or  love  or  pity.  The  world  before  the  war  was  afraid 
above  all  things  of  losing  vitality,  and  so  it  turned  to 
contortionists  of  genius  such  as  Dostoevsky,  or  lesser 
contortionists,  like  some  of  the  Futurists,  for  fear  rest- 
fulness  should  lead  to  death.  It  Avould  be  foolish,  I 
know,  to  pretend  to  sum  up  Dostoevsky  as  a  contortionist  ; 
but  he  has  that  element  in  him.  Mr.  Conrad  suggests 
a  certain  vice  of  misshapcnncss  in  Dostoevsky  when  he 
praises  the  characters  of  Turgenev  in  comparison  with 
his.  "  All  his  creations,  forli-inate  or  unfortunate, 
oppressed  and  oppressors,"  he  says  in  his  fine  tribute 
to  Turgenev  in  Mr.  Garnett's  book,  "  are  human  beings, 
not  strange  beasts  in  a  menagerie,  or  damned  souls 
knocking  themselves  about  in  the  stuffy  darkness  of 
mystical   contradictions."      That   is   well    said.      On   the 


122  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

other  hand,  it  is  only  right  to  remember  that,  if 
Turgenev's  characters  are  human  beings,  they  (at  least 
the  male  characters)  have  a  way  of  being  curiously 
ineffectual  human  beings.  He  understood  the  Hamlet 
in  man  almost  too  well.  From  Rudin  to  the  young 
revolutionist  in  Virgin  Soil,  who  makes  such  a  mess 
of  his  propaganda  among  the  peasantry,  how  many  of 
his  characters  are  as  remarkable  for  their  weakness  as 
their  unsuccess  !  Turgenev  was  probably  conscious  of 
this  pessimism  of  imagination  in  regard  to  his  fellow 
man — at  least,  his  Russian  fellow  man.  In  On  the  Eve, 
when  he  wished  to  create  a  central  character  that  would 
act  as  an  appeal  to  his  countrymen  to  "  conquer  their 
sluggishness,  their  weakness  and  apathy  "  (as  Mr.  Garnett 
puts  it),  he  had  to  choose  a  Bulgarian,  not  a  Russian, 
for  his  hero.  Mr.  Garnett  holds  that  the  characterization 
of  Insarov,  the  Bulgarian,  in  On  the  Eve,  is  a  failure, 
and  puts  this  down  to  the  fact  that  Turgenev  drew 
him,  not  from  life,  but  from  hearsay.  I  think  Mr. 
Gamett  is  wrong,  I  have  known  the  counterpart  of 
Insarov  among  the  members  of  at  least  one  subject 
nation,  and  the  portrait  seems  to  me  to  be  essentially 
true  and  alive.  Luckily,  if  Turgenev  could  not  iput 
his  trust  in  Russian  men,  he  beheved  with  all  his  heart 
in  the  courage  and  goodness  of  Russian  women.  He 
was  one  of  the  first  great  novelists  to  endow  his  women 
with  independence  of  soul.  With  the  majority  of 
novelists,  women  are  sexual  or  sentimental  accidents. 
With  Turgenev,  women  are  equal  human  beings — saviours 
of  men  and  saviours  of  the  world.  Virgin  Soil  becomes 
a  book  of  hope  instead  of  despair  as  the  triumphant 
figure  of  Marianna,  the  young  girl  of  the  Revolution, 
conquers  the  imagination.  Turgenev,  as  a  creator  of 
noble  women,  ranks  with  Browning  and  Meredith.  His 
realism  was  not,  in  the  last  analysis,  a  realism  of 
disparagement,  but  a  realism  of  affection.  His  farewell 
words,  Mr.  Garnett  tells  us,  were:  "Live  and  love 
others  as  I  h^ve  always  loved  thern," 


XIII 
THE    MADNESS    OF    STRINDBERG 

The  mirror  that  Strindberg  held  up  to  Nature  was  a 
cracked  one.  It  was  cracked  in  a  double  sense — it  was 
crazy.  It  gave  back  broken  images  of  a  world  which 
it  made  look  like  the  chaos  of  a  lunatic  dream.  Miss 
Lind-af-Hageby,  in  her  popular  biography  of  Strindberg, 
is  too  intent  upon  saying  what  can  be  said  in  his  defence 
to  make  a  serious  attempt  to  analyse  the  secret  of 
genius  which  is  implicit  in  those  "115  plays,  novels, 
collections  of  stories,  essays,  and  poems  "  which  will 
be  gathered  into  the  complete  edition  of  his  works  shortly 
to  be  published  in  Sweden.  The  biography  will  supply 
the  need  of  that  part  of  the  public  which  has  no  time 
to  read  Strindberg,  but  has  plenty  of  time  to  read 
about  him.  It  will  give  them  a  capably  potted  Strind- 
berg, and  will  tell  them  quietly  and  briefly  much  that 
he  himself  has  told  violently  and  at  length  in  The  Son 
of  a  Servant,  The  Confession  of  a  Fool,  and,  indeed, 
in  nearly  everything  he  wrote.  On  the  other  hand,  Miss 
Lind's  book  has  little  value  as  an  interpretation.  She 
does  not  do  much  to  clear  up  the  reasons  which  have 
made  the  writings  of  this  mad  Swede  matter  of  interest 
in  every  civilized  country  in  the  world.  She  does,  indeed, 
quote  the  remark  of  Gorki,  who,  at  the  time  of  Strind- 
berg's  death,  compared  him  to  the  ancient  Danubian 
hero,  Danko,  "  who,  in  order  to  help  humanity  out 
of  the  darkness  of  problems,  tore  his  heart  out  of  his 
breast,  lit  it,  and  holding  it  high,  led  the  way."  "  Strind- 
berg," Miss  Lind  declares,  "  patiently  burnt  his  heart 
for  the  illumination  of  the  people,  and  on  the  day  when 


124  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

his  body  was  laid  low  in  the  soil,  the  flame  of  his  self- 
immolation  was  seen,  pure  and  inextinguishable."  This 
will  not  do.  "  Patiently  "  is  impossible  ;  so  is  "pure 
and  inextinguishable."  Strindberg  was  at  once  a  man 
of  genius  (and  therefore  noble)  and  a  creature  of  doom 
(and  therefore  to  be  pitied).  But  to  sum  him  up  as  a 
spontaneous  martyr  in  the  greatest  of  great  causes  is 
to  do  injustice  to  language  and  to  the  lives  of  the  saints 
and  heroes.  He  was  a  martyr,  of  course,  in  the  sense 
in  which  we  call'  a  man  a  martyr  to  toothache.  He 
suffered  ;  but  most  of  his  sufferings  were  due,  not  to 
tenderness  of  soul,  but  to  tenderness  of  nerves. 

Other  artists  lay  hold  upon  life  through  an  exceptional 
sensibility.  Strindberg  laid  hold  on  life  through  an 
exceptional  excitability — even  an  exceptional  irritability. 
In  his  plays,  novels,  and  essays  alike,  he  is  a  specialist 
in  the  jars  of  existence.  He  magnified  even  the  smallest 
worries  until  they  assumed  mountainous  proportions.  He 
was  the  kind  of  man  who,  if  something  went  wrong 
with  the  kitchen  boiler,  felt  that  the  Devil  and  all  his 
angels  had  been  loosed  upon  him,  as  upon  the  righteous 
Job,  with  at  least  the  connivance  of  Heaven.  He  seems 
to  have  regarded  the  unsatisfactoriness  of  a  servant  as 
a  scarcely  less  tremendous  evil  than  the  infidelity  of 
a  wife.  If  you  wish  to  see  into  Kvhat  follies  of  exaggera- 
tion Strindberg's  want  of  the  sense  of  proportion  led 
him,  you  cannot  do  better  than  turn  to  those  pages  in 
Zones  of  the  Spirit  (as  the  English  translation  of  his 
Blue  Book  is  called),  in  which  he  tells  us  about  his 
domestic  troubles  at  the  time  of  the  rehearsals  of  The 
Dream  Play. 

My  servant  left  me  ;  my  domestic  arrangements  were  upset ; 
within  forty  days  I  had  six  changes  of  servants — one  worse  than 
the  other.  At  last  I  had  to  serve  myself,  lay  the  table,  and  light 
the  stove.  I  ate  black  broken  victuals  out  of  a  basket.  In  short, 
I  had  to  taste  the  whole  bitterness  of  life  without  knowing  why. 

Much  as  one  may  sympathize  with  a  victim  of  the 
servant  difficulty,  one  cannot  but  regard  the  last  sentence 


THE  MADNESS  OF  STRINDBERG  125 

as,    in   the   vulgar  phrase,    rather   a   tall  order.      But    it 
becomes  taller  still  before  Strindberg  has  done  with  it. 

Then  came  the  dress-rehearsal  of  The  Dream  Play.  This  drama 
I  wrote  seven  years  ago,  after  a  period  of  forty  days'  suffering 
which  were  among  the  worst  which  I  had  ever  undergone.  And 
now  again  exactly  forty  days  of  fasting  iind  pain  had  passed.  There 
seemed,  therefore,  to  be  a  secret  legislature  which  promulgates 
clearly  defined  sentences.  I  thought  of  the  forty  days  of  the 
Flood,  the  forty  years  of  wandering  in  the  desert,  the  forty  days' 
fast  kept  by  Moses,  Elijah,  and  Christ. 

There  you  have  Strindberg 's  secret.  His  work  is, 
for  the  most  part,  simply  the  dramatization  of  the  con- 
flict between  man  and  the  irritations  of  life.  The  chief 
of  these  is,  of  course,  woman.  But  the  lesser  irritations 
never  disappear  from  sight  for  long.  His  obsession 
by  them  is  very  noticeable  in  The  Dream  Play  itself — 
in  that  scene,  for  instance,  in  which  the  Lawyer  and 
the  daughter  of  Indra  having  married,  the  Lawyer  begins 
to  complain  of  the  untidiness  of  their  home,  and  the 
Daughter  to  complain  of  the  dirt  : 

The  Daughter.     This  is  worse  than  I  dreamed  ! 

The  Lawyer.  We  are  not  the  worst  off  by  far.  There  is  still 
food  in  the  pot. 

The  Daughter.     But  what  sort  of   food  ? 

The  Lawyer.     Cabbage  is  cheap,  nourishing,  and  good  to  eat. 

The  Daughter.  For  those  who  like  cabbage — to  me  it  is 
repulsive. 

The  Lawyer.     Why  didn't  you  say  so  ? 

The  Daughter.  Because  I  loved  you.  I  wanted  to  sacrifice 
my  own  taste. 

The  Lawyer.  Then  I  must  sacrifice  my  taste  for  cabbage  to 
you — for  sacrifices  must  be  mutual. 

The  Daughter.  What  are  we  to  eat  then  ?  Fish  ?  But  you 
hate  fish  ? 

The  Lawyer.     And  it  is  expensive. 

The  Daughter.     Tliis  is  worse  than  I  thought  it ! 

The  Lawyer  {kindly).     Yes,  you  see  how  hard  it  is. 

And  the  symbolic  representation  of  married  life  in  terms 
of  fish  and  cabbage  is  taken  up  again  a  little  later  : — 


126  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 

Thk  J^AUGiiriiK.      I  fear  1  shall  l)cj.;iii  to  luite  you  alter  this! 

The  Lawyek.  Woe  to  us,  then  !  But  let  us  forestall  hatred. 
J  promise  never  again  to  speak  of  any  untidiness — although  it 
is   torture  to  me  1 

The  Dalghtke.  And  I  shall  eat  cabbage,  though  it  means 
agony  to  me. 

The  Lawyer.  A  life  of  common  suffering,  then  !  One's 
pleasure  the  other  one's  pain. 

One  feels  that,  however  true  to  nature  the  drift  of 
this  may  be,  it  is  Httle  more  than  bacilli  of  truth  seen 
as  inmiense  through  a  microscope.  The  agonies  and 
tortures  arising  from  eating  cabbage  and  such  things 
may,  no  doubt,  have  tragic  consequences  enough,  but 
somehow  the  men  whom  these  things  put  on  the  rack 
refuse  to  come  to  life  in  the  imagination  on  the  same 
tragic  plane  where  Prometheus  lies  on  his  crag  and 
Gulipus  strikes  out  his  eyes  that  they  may  no  longer 
look  upon  his  shame.  Strindberg  is  too  anxious  to 
make  tragedy  out  of  discomforts  instead  of  out  of  sorrows. 
When  he  is  denouncing  woman  as  a  creature  who  loves 
above  all  things  to  deceive  her  husband,  his  supreme 
way  of  expressing  his  abhorrence  is  to  declare  :  "  If 
she  can  trick  him  into  eating  horse-flesh  without  noticing 
it,  she  is  happy."  Here,  and  in  a  score  of  similar 
passages,  we  can  see  how  physical  were  the  demons 
that  endlessly  consumed  Strindberg's  peace  of  mind. 

His  attitude  to  women,  as  we  find  it  expressed  in 
The  Confession  of  a  Fool,  The  Dance  of  Death,  and 
all  through  his  work,  is  that  of  a  man  overwhelmed 
with  the  physical.  He  raves  now  with  lust,  now 
with  disgust — two  aspects  of  the  same  mood.  He  turns 
from  love  to  hatred  with  a  chimge  of  front  as  swift  as 
a  drunkard's.  He  is  the  Mad  Mullah  of  all  the  sex- 
antagonism  that  has  ever  troubled  men  since  they  began 
to  think  of  woman  as  a  temptress.  He  was  the  most 
enthusiastic  modern  exponent  of  the  point-of-view  of 
that  Adam  who  explained  :  "  The  woman  tempted  me." 
Strindbcrg  deliberately  wrote  those  words  on  his  banner 
and  held   them  aloft  to  his  generation  as  the  summary 


THE  MADNESS  OF  STIUNDBERG         127 

of  an  clemal  gospel.  Miss  Liiid-af-llagcby  lells  us 
that,  at  one  period  of  his  life,  he  was  sufficiently  free 
from  the  physical  obsessions  of  sex  to  preach  the 
ecjuality  of  men  and  women  and  even  to  herald  the  com- 
ing of  woman  suH'rage.  But  his  abiding  view  of  woman 
was  that  of  the  plain  man  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
He  must  either  be  praising  her  as  a  Ininistering  angel  or 
denouncing  her  as  a  ministering  devil— preferably  the 
latter.  It  would  be  nonsense,  however,  to  pretend  that 
Strindberg  did  not  see  at  least  one  class  of  women  clearly 
and  truly.  The  accuracy  with  which  he  portrays  woman 
the  parasite,  the  man-eater,  the  siren,  is  quite  terrible. 
No  writer  of  his  day  was  so  shudderingly  conscious 
of  every  gesture,  movement,  and  intonation  with  which 
the  spider-woman  sets  out  to  lure  the  mate  she  is  going 
to  devour.  It  may  be  that  he  prophesies  against  the  sins 
of  women  rather  than  subtly  analyses  and  describes  them 
as  a  better  artist  would  have  done.  The  Confessions  of 
a  Fool  is  less  a  revelation  of  the  soul  of  his  first  wife 
than  an  attack  on  her.  But  we  must,  in  fairness  to 
Strindberg,  remember  that  in  his  violences  against  women 
he  merely  gives  us  a  new  rendering  of  an  indictment 
that  goes  back  to  the  beginning  of  history.  The  world 
to  him  was  a  long  lane  of  oglings,  down  which  man  must 
fly  in  terror  with  his  eyes  shut  and  his  ears  covered. 
His  foolishness  as  a  prophet  consists,  not  in  his  suspicions 
of  woman  regarded  as  an  animal,  but  in  his  frothing 
at  the  mouth  at  the  idea  that  she  should  claim  to  be 
treated  as  something  higher  than  an  animal.  None 
the  less,  he  denied  to  the  end  that  he  was  a  woman- 
hater.      His  denial,  however,  was  grimly  unllallcring  : — 

I  have  said  that  the  child  is  a  httlc  criminal,  incapable  of  self- 
guidance,  but  I  love  children  all  the  same.  I  have  said  that  woman 
is — what  she  is,  but  I  have  always  loved  some  woman,  and  been 
a  father.  Whoever,  therefore,  calls  me  a  woman-hater  is  a  block- 
head, a  liar,  or  a  noodle.     Or  all   three  together. 

Sex,  of  course,  was  the  greatest  cross  Strindberg  had 
to  bear.     But  there  were  hundreds  of  other  little  chang- 


128  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

iiig  crosses,  from  persecution  mania  to  poverty,  which 
supplanted  each  other  from  day  to  day  on  his  back. 
He  suffered  continually  both  from  the  way  he  was  made 
and  from  the  way  the  world  w^as  made.  His  novels 
and  plays  are  a  literature  of  sufifering.  He  reveals 
himself  there  as  a  man  pursued  by  furies,  a  manwdthout 
rest.  He  flies  to  a  thousand  distractions  and  hiding- 
places — drink  and  lust  and  piano -playing,  Chinese  and 
chemistry,  painting  and  acting,  alchemy  and  poison,  and 
religion.  Some  of  these,  no  doubt,  he  honestly  turns 
to  for  a  living.  But  in  his  rush  from  one  thing  to 
another  he  shows  the  restlessness  of  a  man  goaded  to 
madness.  Not  that  his  life  is  to  be  regarded  as  entirely 
miserable.  He  obviously  gets  a  good  deal  of  pleasure 
even  out  of  his  acutest  pain.  "  I  find  the  joy  of  life 
in  its  violent  and  cruel  struggles,"  he  tells  us  in  the 
preface  to  Miss  Julia,  "  and  my  pleasure  lies  in  knowing 
something  and  learning  something."  He  is  always  con- 
sumed with  the  greed  of  knowledge — a  phase  of  his  greed 
of  domination.  It  is  this  that  enables  him  to  turn  his 
inferno  into  a  purgatory. 

In  his  later  period,  indeed,  he  is  optimist  enough 
to  believe  that  the  sufferings  of  life  cleanse  and  ennoble. 
By  tortuous  ways  of  sin  he  at  last  achieves  the  simple 
faith  of  a  Christian.  He  originally  revolted  from  this 
faith  more  through  irritation  than  from  principle.  One 
feels  that,  with  happier  nerves  and  a  happier  environment, 
he  might  easily  have  passed  his  boyhood  as  the  model 
pupil  in  the  Sunday-school.  It  is  significant  that  we 
find  him  in  The  Confession  of  a  Fool  reciting  Longfellow's 
Excelsior  to  the  first  and  worst  of  his  wives.  Strindberg 
may  have  been  possessed  of  a  devil  ;  he  undoubtedly 
liked  to  play  the  part  of  a  devil  ;  but  at  heart  he  was 
constantly  returning  to  the  Longfellow  sentiment,  though, 
of  course,  his  hungry  intellectual  curiosity  was  some- 
thing that  Longfellow  never  knew.  In  his  volume  pi 
fables.  In  Midsummer  Days,  we  see  how  essentially  good 
and  simple  were  his  ideas  when  he  could  rid  himself  of 


THE  MADNESS  OF  STRINDBERG         129 

sex  mania  and  persecution  mania.  Probably  his  love  of 
children  always  kept  him  more  or  less  in  chains  to  virtue. 
Ultimately  he  yielded  himself  a  vdctim,  not  to  the  furies, 
but  to  the  stilt  more  remorseless  pursuit  of  the  Hound 
of  Heaven.  On  his  death-bed,  Miss  Lind  tells  us,  he 
held  up  the  Bible  and  said  :  "  This  alone  is  right." 
Through  his  works,  however,  he  serves  virtue  best,  not 
by  directly  praising  it,  but  by  his  eagerly  earnest  account 
of  the  madness  of  the  seven  deadly  sins,  as  well  as  of 
the  seventy-seven  deadly  irritations.  He  has  not  the 
originality  of  fancy  or  imagination  to  paint  virtue  well. 
His  genius  was  the  genius  of  frank  and  destructive 
criticism.  His  work  is  a  jumble  of  ideas  and  an  auto- 
biography of  raw  nerves  rather  than  a  revelation  of 
the  emotions  of  men  and  women.  His  great  claim  on 
our  attention,  however,  is  that  his  autobiography  is  true 
as  far  as  the  power  of  truth  was  in  him.  His  pilgrim's 
progress  through  madness  to  salvation  is  neither  a  pretty 
nor  a  sensational  lie.  It  is  a  genuine  document.  That 
is  why,  badly  constructed  though  his  plays  and  novels 
are,  some  of  them  have  a  fair  chance  of  being  read 
a  hundred  years  hence.  As  a  writer  of  personal  litera- 
ture, he  was  one  of  the  b.old  and  original  men  of  his 
time. 


XIV 
"THE    PRINCE    OF    FRENCH    POETS" 

It  is  difficult  nowadays  to  conceive  that,  within  half  a 
century  of  his  death,  Ronsard's  fame  suffered  so  dark  an 
eclipse  that  no  new  edition  of  his  works  was  called  for 
between  1629  and  1857.  When  he  died,  he  was,  as 
M.  Jusserand  reminds  us,  the  most  illustrious  man  of 
letters  in  Europe.  He  seemed,  too,  to  have  all  those 
gifts  of  charm— charm  of  mood  and  music — which  make 
immortality  certain.  And  yet,  in  the  iTile-of -thumb  ages 
that  were  to  follow,  he  sank  into  such  disesteem  in 
his  own  country  that  Boileau  had  not  a  good  word 
for  him,  and  Voltaire  roundly  said  of  him  that  he 
"  spoiled  the  language."  Later,  we  have  Arnauld  assert- 
ing that  France  had  only  done  herself  dishonour  by  her 
enthusiasm  for  "  the  wretched  poetry  of  Ronsard." 
Fenelon,  as  M.  Jusserand  tells  us,  discusses  Ronsard 
as  a  linguist,  and  ignores  him  as  a  poet. 

It  was  the  romantic  revival  of  the  nineteenth  century 
that  placed  Ronsard  on  a  throne  again.  Even  to-day, 
however,  there  are  pessimistic  Frenchmen  who  doubt 
whether  their  country  has  ever  produced  a  great  poet. 
Mr.  Bennet  has  told  us  of  one  who,  on  being  asked  who 
was  the  greatest  of  French  poets,  replied  :  "  Victor 
Hugo,  helas  !  "  And  in  the  days  when  Hugo  was  still 
but  a  youth  the  doubt  must  have  been  still  more  pain- 
ful. So  keenly  was  the  want  of  a  national  poet  felt 
that,  if  one  could  not  have  been  discovered,  the  French 
would  have  had  to  invent  him.  It  was  necessary 
for  the  enthusiastic  young  romanticists  to  possess  a  great 
indigenous   figure  to   stand  beside   those  imported   idols 

130 


''THE  PRINCE  OF  FRENCH  POETS''      131 

— Shakespeare,  Byron,  Goethe,  and  Dante.  Sainte-Beuve, 
who  brought  out  a  Ronsard  anthology  with  a  critical 
essay  in  1828,  showed  them  where  to  look.  After  that, 
it  was  as  though  French  literature  had  begun  with 
Ronsard.  He  was  the  "  ideal  ancestor."  He  was,  as 
it  were,  a  re -discovered  fatherland.  But  his  praise  since 
then  has  been  no  mere  task  of  patriotism.  It  has  been 
a  deep  enthusiasm  for  literature.  "  You  cannot  imagine," 
wrote  Flaubert,  in  1852,"  what  a  poet  Ronsard  is.  What 
a  poet  !  What  a  poet  !  What  wings  !  .  .  .  This  morn- 
ing, at  half-past  twelve,  I  read  a  poem  aloud  which 
almost  upset  my  nerves,  it  gave  me  so  much  pleasure." 
That  may  be  taken  as  the  characteristic  French  view 
of  Ronsard.  It  may  be  an  exaggerated  view.  It  may 
be  fading  to  some  extent  before  modern  influences.  But 
it  is  unlikely  that  Ronsard's  reputation  in  his  own  country 
will  ever  again  be  other  than  that  of  a  great  poet.  ' 

At  the  same  time,  it  is  not  easy,  on  literary  grounds, 
to  acquiesce  in  all  the  praises  that  have  been  heaped 
upon  him.  One  would  imagine  from  Flaubert's  ex- 
clamations that  Ronsard  had  a  range  like  Shelley's, 
whereas,  in  fact,  he  was  more  comparable  with  the 
English  cavalier  poets.  He  had  the  cavalier  poet's  gift 
of  making  love  seem  a  profession  rather  than  a  passion. 
He  was  always  very  much  a  gentleman,  both  in  his  moods 
and  his  philosophy.  A  great  deal'  of  his  best  poetry  is 
merely  a  variation  on  carpe  diem.  On  the  other 
hand,  though  he  never  went  very  deep  or  very  high,  he 
did  express  real  sentiments  and  emotions  in  poetry.  Few 
poets  have  sung  the  regret  for  youth  more  sincerely 
and  more  beautifully,  and,  with  Ronsard,  regret  for  the 
lost  wonder  of  his  own  youth  was  perhaps  the  acutest 
emotion  he  ever  knew.  He  was  himself,  in  his  early 
years,  one  of  those  glorious  youths  who  have  the  genius 
of  charm  and  comeliness,  of  grace  and  strength  and  the 
arts.  He  excelled  at  football  as  in  lute-playing.  He 
danced,  fenced,  and  rode  better  than  the  best  ;  and, 
with   his   noble   countenance,   his   strong   hmbs,    his  fair 


132  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

beard,  and  his  "  eyes  full  of  gentle  gravity,"  he  must 
have  been  the  picture  of  the  perfect  courtier  and  soldier. 
Above  all,  we  are  told,  his  conversation  was  delightful. 
He  had  "  the  gift  of  pleasing."  When  he  went  to 
Scotland  in  1537  with  Madeleine,  the  King's  daughter, 
to  attend  as  page  her  tragic  marriage  with  James  V, 
James  was  so  attracted  by  him  that  he  did  not  allow 
him  to  leave  the  country  for  two  years-  With  every 
gift  of  popularity  and  success,  with  the  world  apparently 
already  at  his  feet,  Ronsard  was  suddenly  struck  down 
by  an  illness  that  crippled  his  whole  life.  He  became 
deaf,  or  half -deaf.  His  body  was  tortured  with  arthritis 
and  recurrent  attacks  of  gout.  His  career  as  a  courtier 
lay  in  ruins  before  him. 

Possibly,  had  it  not  been  so,  his  genius  as  a  poet 
would  have  spent  itself  in  mere  politeness.  The  loss  of 
his  physical  splendour  and  the  death  of  more  than  one 
of  his  companions,  however,  filled  him  with  an  extreme 
sense  of  the  transitoriness  of  the  beauty  of  the  world 
—of  youth  and  fame  and  flowers — and  turned  him  both 
to  serious  epicureanism  and  to  serious  writing.  By  the 
year  1550  he  was  leading  the  young  men  of  France 
in  a  great  literary  renaissance — a  reaction  against  the 
lifeless  jingle  of  ballades  and  punning  rhymes.  Like 
du  Bellay,  he  asked  himself  and  his  contemporaries  : 
"  Are  we,  then,  less  than  the  Greeks  and  Romans?  " 
And  he  set  out  to  lay  the  foundations  in  France  of  a 
literature  as  individual  in  its  genius  as  the  ancient  classics. 
M.  Jusserand,  in  a  most  interesting  chapter,  relates  the 
story  of  the  battles  over  form  and  language  which  were 
fought  by  French  men  of  letters  in  the  days  of  La  Pleiade. 
In  an  age  of  awakenings,  of  conquests,  of  philosophies, 
of  discussions  on  everything  under  the  sun,  the  literature 
of  tricksters  was  ultimately  bound  to  give  way  before 
the  bold  originality  and  the  sincerities  of  the  new  school. 
But  Ronsard  had  to  endure  a  whole  parliament  of 
mockery  before  the  day  of  victory. 

Of  his   life,   apart  from  his  work  in  literature,  there 


THE  PRINCE  OF  FRENCH  POETS''      133 


is  little  to  tell.  For  a  man  who  lived  in  France  in  clays 
when  Protestantism  and  Catholicism  were  murderously 
at  one  another's  throats,  he  had  a  peculiarly  uneventful 
career.  This,  too,  though  he  threw  himself  earnestly 
into  the  battle  against  the  heretics.  He  had  begun  by 
sympathizing  with  Protestantism,  because  it  promised 
much-needed  reforms  in  the  Church  ;  but  the  sympathy 
was  short-lived.  In  1553,  though  a  layman,  he  was 
himself  filling  various  ecclesiastical  offices.  He  drew 
the  salaries  of  several  priories  during  his  life,  more 
lowly  paid  priests  apparently  doing  the  work.  Though 
an  earnest  Catholic,  however,  Ronsard  was  never  faith- 
less to  friends  who  took  the  other  side.  He  published 
his  kindly  feelings  towards  Odet  de  Coligny,  the 
Admiral's  cardinal  brother,  for  instance,  who  had  adopted 
Protestantism  and  married,  and,  though  he  could  write 
bloodily  enough  against  his  sectarian  enemies,  the  cry 
for  tolerance,  for  pity,  for  peace,  seems  continually  to 
force  itself  to  his  lips  amid  the  wars  of  the  time.  M. 
Jusserand  lays  great  stress  on  the  plain-spokenness  of 
Ronsard.  He  praises  especially  the  courage  with  which 
the  poet  often  spoke  out  his  mind  to  kings  and  church- 
men, though  no  man  could  write  odes  fuller  of  exagger- 
ated adulation  when  they  were  wanted.  He  sometimes 
counselled  kings,  we  are  told,  "  in  a  tone  that,  after 
all  our  revolutions,  no  writer  would  dare  to  employ 
to-day."  Perhaps  M.  Jusserand  over-estimates  the  bold- 
ness with  which  his  hero  could  remind  kings  that  they, 
like  common  mortals,  were  made  of  mud.  He  has  done 
so,  I  imagine,  largely  in  order  to  clear  him  from  the 
charge  of  being  a  flatterer.  It  is  interesting  to  be  re- 
minded, by  the  way,  that  one  of  his  essays  in  flattery  was 
an  edition  of  his  works  dedicated,  by  order  of  Catherine 
de  M^dicis,  to  Elizabeth  of  England,  whom  he  compared 
to  all  the  incomparables,  adding  a  eulogy  of  "  Mylord 
Robert  Du-D16  comte  de  I'Encestre  "  as  the  ornament  of 
the  Enghsh,  the  wonder  of  the  world.  Elizabeth  was  de- 
lighted, and  gave  the  poet  a  diamond  for  his  pretty  book. 


184  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

But  Ronsard  does  not  live  in  literature  mainly  as 
a  flatterer.  Nor  is  he  remembered  as  a  keeper  of  the 
conscience  of  princes,  or  as  a  religious  controversialist. 
If  nothing  but  his  love-poems  had  survived,  we  should 
have  almost  all  his  work  that  is  of  literary  importance. 
He  fell  in  love  in  the  grand  manner  three  times,  and 
from  these  three  passions  most  of  his  good  poetry  flowed. 
First  there  was  Cassandre,  the  beautiful  girl  of  Florentine 
extraction,  whom  he  saw  singing  to  her  lute,  when  he 
was  only  twenty -two,  and  loved  to  distraction.  She 
married  another  and  became  the  star  of  Ronsard's  song. 
She  was  the  irruptive  heroine  of  that  witty  and  delight- 
ful sonnet  on  the  Iliad  : — 

Je  veux  lire  en  trois  jours  I'lliade  d'flomere, 
Et  pour  ce,  Corydon,  ferme  bien  I'huis  sur  nioi  ; 
Si  rien  me  vient  troubler,  je  t'assure  ma  foi, 
Tu  sentiras  combien  pesante  est  ma  colere. 

Je  ne  veux  seulement  que  notre  chambri^re 
Vienne  faire  mon  lit,  ton  compagnon  ni  toi  ; 
Je  veux  trois  jours  entiers  demeurer  a  recoi. 
Pour  folatrer  apres  une  semaine  entiere. 

Mais,  si  quelqu'un  venait  de  la  part  de  Cassandre, 
Ouvre-lui  tot  la  porte,  et  ne  le  fais  attendre, 
Soudain  entre  en  ma  chambre  et  me  viens  accoutrer. 

Je  veux  tant  seulement  a  lui  seul  me  montrer  ; 
Au  reste,  si  un  dieu  voulait  pour  moi  descendre 
Du  ciel,  ferme  la  porte  et  ne  le  laisse  entrer. 

Nine  years  after  Cassandre  came  Marie,  the  fifteen- 
year-old  daughter  of  an  Angevin  villager,  nut-brown, 
smiling,  and  with  cheeks  the  colour  of  a  May  rose. 
She  died  young,  but  not  before  she  had  made  Ronsard 
sufl'er  by  coquetting  with  another  lover.  What  is  more 
important  still,  not  before  she  had  inspired  him  to  write 
that  sonnet  which  has  about  it  so  much  of  the  charm 
of  the  morning  : — 


■flii 


''THE  PRINCE  OF  FRENCH  POETS''      185 

Mignonne,  levez-vous,  vous  etes  paiesseuse, 
Jk  la  gaie  alouette  au  ciel  a  Iredonue, 
Et  jci  le  rossignol  doucement  jargonne, 
Dessus  rapine  assis,  sa  complainte  amoureuse. 

Sus  !  debout !  allons  voir  I'herbelette  perleuse, 
Et  votre  beau  rosier  de  boutons  couronn6, 
Et  vos  oeillets  aimds  aiixquels  aviez  donn6 
Hier  au  soir  de  I'eau  d'une  main  si  soigneuse. 

Harsoir  en  vous  couchant  vous  j  urates  vos  yeux 
D'etre  plus  tdt  que  moi  ce  matin  eveillee  : 
Mais  le  dormir  de  I'aube,  aux  filles  gracieux, 

Vous  tient  d'un  doux  sommeil  encor  les  yeux  sill6e». 

Ca,  9a,  que  je  les  baise,  et  votre  beau  tetin, 

Cent  fois,  pour  vous  apprendre  a  vous  lever  matin. 

Ronsard  was  old  and  grey — at  least,  he  was  old  before 
his  time  and  grey — ^when  he  met  Helene  de  Sorg^res, 
maid  of  honour  to  the  Queen,  and  began  the  third  of 
his  grand  passions.  He  lived  all  the  life  of  a  young 
lover  over  again.  They  went  to  dances  together,  H^l^ne 
in  a  mask.  Helene  gave  her  poet  a  crown  of  myrtle 
and  laurel.  They  had  childish  quarrels  and  swore  eternal 
fidelity.  It  was  for  her  that  Ronsard  made  the  most 
exquisite  of  his  sonnets  :  Qiiand  vous  serez  bien  vieille 
— a  sonnet  of  which  Mr.  Yeats  has  written  a  magical 
version    in    English. 

It  is  in  referring  to  the  sonnets  for  Hel(l'ne  that  M. 
Jusserand  calls  attention  to  the  realism  of  Ronsard's 
poetry.  He  points  out  that  one  seems  to  see  the  women 
Ronsard  loves  far  more  clearly  than  the  heroines  of 
many  other  poets.  He  notes  the  same  genius  of  realism 
again  when  he  is  relating  how  Ronsard,  on  the  eve 
of  his  death,  as  he  was  transported  from  priory  to 
priory,  in  hope  of  relief  in  each  new  place,  wrote  a 
poem  of  farewell  to  his  friends,  in  which  he  described 
the  skeleton  horrors  of  his  state  with  a  minute  care- 
fulness.   Ronsard,  indeed,  showed  himself  a  very  personal 


136  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

chronicler  throughout  his  work.  "  He  cannot  hide  the 
fact  that  he  hkes  to  sleep  on  the  left  side,  that  he 
hates  cats,  dislikes  servants  '  with  slow  hands,'  believes 
in  omens,  adores  physical  exercises  and  gardening,  and 
prefers,  especially  in  summer,  vegetables  to  meat."  M. 
Jusserand,  I  may  add,  has  written  the  just  and  scholarly 
praise  of  a  most  winning  poet.  His  book,  which  appears 
in  the  Grands  Ecrivains  Fran^ais  series,  is  not  only 
a  good  biographical  study,  but  an  admirable  narrative 
of  literary  and  national  history. 


XV 
ROSSETTI    AND    RITUAL 

ROSSETTI'S  great  gift  to  his  time  was  the  gift  of 
beauty,  of  beauty  to  be  worshipped  in  the  sacred  hush 
of  a  temple.  His  work  is  not  richer  in  the  essentials 
of  beauty  than  Browning's — it  is  not,  indeed,  nearly 
so  rich  ;  but,  while  Browning  served  beauty  joyously, 
a  god  in  a  firmament  of  gods,  Rossetti  burned  a  lonely 
candle  to  it  as  to  the  only  true  god.  To  Browning, 
the  temple  of  beauty  was  but  a  house  in  a  living  world  ; 
to  Rossetti,  the  world  outside  the  temple  was,  for  the 
most  part,  a  dead  world.  Jenny  may  seem  to  stand 
in  vivid  contradiction  of  this.  But  Jenny  was  an 
exceptional  excursion  into  life,  and  hardly  expresses 
the  Rossetti  that  was  a  power  in  art  and  literature. 
Him  we  find  best,  perhaps,  in  The  Blessed  Damozel, 
written  when  he  was  little  more  than  a  boy.  And 
this  is  not  surprising,  for  the  arrogant  love  of  beauty, 
out  of  which  the  aesthetic  sort  of  art  and  literature 
has  been  born,  is  essentially  a  boy's  love.  Poets  who 
are  sick  with  this  passion  must  either  die  young,  Hke 
Keats,  or  survive  merely  to  echo  their  younger  selves, 
like  Swinburne.  They  are  splendid  in  youth,  like 
Aucassin,  whose  swooning  passion  for  Nicolette  is 
symbolical  of  their  almost  painful  desire  of  beauty. 
In  Hand  and  Soul,  Rossetti  tells  us  of  Chiaro  dell* 
Erma  that  "  he  would  feel  faint  in  sunsets  and  at 
the  sight  of  stately  persons."  Keats's  Odes  express 
the  same  ecstasy  of  faintness,  and  Rossetti  himself 
was  obviously  a  close  nineteenth-century  counterpart 
of  Chiaro.  Even  when  he  troubles  about  the  soul — 
and  he  constantly  troubles  about  it — he  never  seems  to  be 


188  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

able  altogether  to  escape  out  of  what  may  be  called 
the  higher  sensationalism  into  genuine  mysticism. 
His  work  is  earth-born  :  it  is  rich  in  earthly  desire. 
His  symbols  were  not  wings  to  enable  the  soul  to  escape 
into  a  divine  world  of  beauty.  They  were  the  play- 
things of  a  grown  man,  loved  for  their  own  beauty  more 
than  for  any  beauty  they  could  help  the  spirit  to  reach. 
Rossetti  belongs  to  the  ornamental  school  of  poetry. 
He  writes  more  like  a  man  who  has  gone  into  a 
library  than  like  one  who  has  gone  out  to  Nature, 
and  ornamentalism  in  poetry  is  simply  the  result  of 
seeing  life,  not  directly,  but  through  the  coloured  glass 
of  literature  and  the  other  arts.  Rossetti  was  the 
forerunner  of  all  those  artists  and  authors  of  recent 
times,  who,  in  greater  or  less  degree,  looked  on  art 
as  a  weaving  of  patterns,  an  arrangement  of  wonderful 
words  and  sounds  and  colours.  Pater  in  his  early 
writings,  William  Morris,  Oscar  Wilde,  and  all  those 
others  who  dreamed  that  it  was  the  artist's  province 
to  enrich  the  world  with  beautiful  furniture — for  conduct 
itself  seemed,  in  the  philosophy  of  these  writers,  to  aspire 
after  the  quality  of  tapestry — are  implicit  in  The  Blessed 
Damozel  and  Troy  Town.  It  is  not  that  Rossetti  could 
command  words  like  Pater  or  Wilde.  His  phrasing, 
if  personal,  is  curiously  empty  of  the  graces.  He 
often  does  achieve  graces  of  phrase  ;  but  some  of 
his  most  haunting  poems  owe  their  power  over  us 
to  their  general  pattern,  and  not  to  any  persistent 
fine  workmanship.  How  beautiful  Troy  Town  is,  for 
instance,  and  yet  how  lacking  in  beautiful  verses  !  The 
poet  was  easily  content  in  his  choice  of  words  who  could 
leave  a  verse  like  : — 

Venus  looked  on  Helen's  gift  ; 

(p  Troy  Town  !) 
Looked  and  smiled  with  subtle  drift. 
Saw  the  work  of  her  heart's  desire  : — 
"  There  thou  kneel'st  for  I.ove  to  lift  !  " 

(P  Troy's  down, 

Tall  Troy's  on  fire  !) 


EOSSETTI   AND   RITUAL  139 

Rossetti  never  wrote  a  poem  that  was  fine  throughout. 
There  is  nothing  to  correspond  to  The  Skylark  or 
the  Ode  to  a  Grecian  Urn  or  Childe  Roland  to  the 
Dark  Tower  Came  in  his  work.  The  truth  is,  he 
was  not  a  great  poet,  because  he  was  not  a  singer. 
He  was  capable  of  decorations  in  verse,  but  he  was 
not  capable  of  song.  His  sonnets,  it  may  be  argued, 
are  more  than  decorations.  But  even  they  are  laden 
with  beauty  ;  they  are  never,  as  it  were,  light  and 
alight  with  it,  as  are  Sliall  I  compare  thee  to  a 
summer's  day?  and  Where  lies  the  land  to  which  yon 
ship  must  go?  They  have  Hagging  pulses  like  desire 
itself,  and  are  often  weary  before  the  fourteenth  line. 
Only  rarely  do  we  get  a  last  si.K  lines  like  : — 

O  love,  my  love  !  if  I  no  more  should  see 
Thyself,  nor  on  the  earth  the  shadow  of  thee. 

Nor  image  of  thine  eyes  in  any  spring, — 
How  then  should  sound  upon  Life's  darkening  slope 
The  ground-whirl  of  the  perished  leaves  of  Hope, 

The  wind  of  Death's  imperishable  wing  ? 

And,  beautiful  as  this  is,  is  not  the  imagery  of  the 
closing  lines  a  Httle  more  deliberate  than  we  are 
conscious  of  in  the  great  work  of  the  great  singers? 
One  never  feels  that  the  leaves  and  the  winds  in  them- 
selves were  sufficiently  full  of  meaning  and  delight  for 
Rossetti.  Pie  loved  them  as  pictorial  properties — as 
a   designer   rather   than  a   poet    lov^es   them. 

In  his  use  of  the  very  mysteries  of  Christianity, 
he  is  intoxicated  chiefly  by  the  beauty  of  the  designs 
by  which  the  painters  have  expressed  their  vision  of 
reiligion.  His  Ave  is  a  praise  of  the  beauty  of  art 
more  than  a  praise  of  the  beauty  of  divinity.  In  it 
we  are  told  how,  on  the  eve  of  the  Annunciation, 

Far  off  the  trees  were  as  pale  wands. 
Against  the  fervid  sky  :  the  sea 
Sighed  further  off  eternally 
As  human  sorrow  sighs  in  sleep. 

The  poem  is  not  a  hymn  but  a  decorated  theme.     And 


140  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

yet  there  is  a  sincere  vain-longing  running  through 
Rossetti's  work  that  keeps  it  from  being  artificial  or 
pretentious.  This  was  no  less  real  for  being  vague. 
His  work  is  an  attempt  to  satisfy  his  vain-longing  with 
rites  of  words  and  colour.  He  always  sought  to  bring 
peace  to  his  soul  by  means  of  ritual.  .When  he  was 
dying,  he  v/as  anxious  to  see  a  confessor.  "  I  can 
make  nothing  of  Christianity,"  he  said,  "  but  I  only 
want  a  confessor  to  give  me  absolution  for  my  sins.'' 
That  was  typical  of  his  attitude  to  life.  He  loved  its 
ceremonies  more — at  least,  more  vividly — than  he  loved 
its  soul.  One  is  never  done  hearing  about  his  demand 
for  "  fundamental  brainwork  "  in  art.  But  his  own 
poetry  is  poor  enough  in  brainwork.  It  is  the  poetry 
of  one  who,  like  Keats,  hungered  for  a  "  life  of  sensa- 
tions rather  than  of  thoughts."  It  is  the  poetry  of 
grief,  of  regret — the  grief  and  regret  of  one  who  was 
a  master  of  sensuous  beauty,  and  who  reveals  sensuous 
beauty  rather  than  any  deeper  secret  even  in  touching 
spiritual  themes.  Poetry  with  him  is  a  dyed  and 
embroidered  garment  which  weighs  the  spirit  down 
rather  than  winged  sandals  like  Shelley's,  which  set 
the  spirit  free. 

Yet  his  influence  on  art  and  literature  has  been 
immense.  He,  far  more  than  Keats  or  Swinburne, 
was  the  prophet  of  that  ritualism  which  has  been  3., 
dominant  characteristic  in  modern  poetry,  whether  it 
is  the  Pagan  ritualism  of  Mr.  Yeats  or  the  Catholic 
ritualism  of  Francis  Thompson.  One  need  not  believe 
that  he  was  an  important  direct  influence  on  either 
of  these  poets.  But  his  work  as  poet  and  painter 
prepared  the  world  for  ritualism  in  literature.  No 
doubt  the  medisevalism  of  Scott  and  the  decorative 
imagination  of  Keats  were  also  largely  responsible  for 
the  change  in  the  literary  atmosphere  ;  but  Rossetti 
was  more  distinctively  a  symbolist  and  ritualist  than 
any  other  English  man  of  letters  who  lived  in  the 
early   or  middle  part  of  the  nineteenth  century. 


ROSSETTI  AND   RITUAL  141 

People  used  to  debate  whether  he  was  greater  as 
a  painter  or  as  a  poet,  and  he  was  not  always  sure 
himself.  When,  however,  he  said  to  Burne-Jones,  in 
1857  :  "If  any  man  has  any  poetry  in  him,  he  should 
paint  ;  for  it  has  all  been  said  and  written,  and  they 
have  scarcely  begun  to  paint  it,"  he  gave  convincing 
proof  that  painting,  and  not  jxjetry,  was  his  essential 
gift.  He  may  be  denounced  for  his  bad  drawing  and 
twenty  other  faults  as  an  artist  ;  but  it  is  his  paintings 
that  show  him  as  a  discoverer  and  a  man  of  high 
genius.  At  the  same  time,  how  well  he  can  also  paint 
in  verse,  as  in  those  ever-moving  lines  on  Jenny's 
wanderings   in  the   Haymarket  : — 

Jenny,  yon  know  the  citj'  now. 

A  child  can  tell  the  tale  there,  how 

Some  things  which  are  not  yet  enroll 'd 

In  market-lists  are  bought  and  sold. 

Even  till  the  early  Sunday  liglit, 

When  Saturday  night  is  niarkct-night 

Everywhere,  be  it  dry  or  wet. 

And  market-night  in  the  Haymarket. 

Our  learned  London  children  know. 

Poor  Jenny,  all  your  pride  and  woe  ; 

Have  seen  your  lifted  silken  skirt 

Advertise  dainties  through  the  dirt  ; 

Have  seen  your  coach  wheels  splash  rebuke 

On  virtue  ;   and  have  learned  your  look 

When  wealth  and  health  slipped  past,  you  stare 

Along  the  streets  alone,  and  there, 

Round  the  long  park,  across  the  bridge. 

The  cold  lamps  at  the  pavement's  edge 

Wind  on  together  and  apart, 

A  fiery  serpent  for  your  heart. 

In  most  of  his  poems,  unfortunately,  the  design,  as  a 
whole,  rambles.  His  imagination  worked  best  when 
limited  by  the  four  sides  of  a  canvas. 


XVI 
MR.    BERNARD    SHAW 

Mr.  Shaw  came  for  a  short  time  recently  to  be 
regarded  less  as  an  author  than  as  an  incident  in 
the  European  War.  In  the  opinion  of  many  people, 
it  seemed  as  if  the  Allies  were  fighting  against  a 
combination  composed  of  Germany,  Austria-Hungary, 
Turkey,  and  Mr.  Shaw.  Mr.  Shaw's  gift  of  infuriating 
people  is  unfailing.  He  is  one  of  those  rare  public 
men  who  can  hardly  express  an  opinion  on  potato- 
culture — and  he  does  express  an  opinion  on  everything 
— without  making  a  multitude  of  people  shake  their  fists 
in  impotent  anger.  His  life — at  least,  his  public  life — has 
been  a  jibe  opposed  to  a  rage.  He  has  gone  about,  like 
a  pickpocket  of  illusions,  from  the  world  of  literature 
to  the  world  of  morals,  and  from  the  world  of  morals 
to  the  world  of  politics,  and,  everywhere  he  has  gone, 
an   innumerable  growl  has  followed  him. 

Not  that  he  has  not  had  his  disciples — men  and  women 
who  believe  that  what  Mr.  Shaw  says  on  'any  conceivable 
subject  is  far  more  important  than  what  The  Times 
or  the  Manchester  Guardian  says.  He  has  never 
founded  a  church,  however,  because  he  has  always 
been  able  to  laugh  at  his  disciples  as  unfeelingly  as 
at  anybody  else.  He  has  courted  unpopularity  as  other 
men  have  courted  popularity.  He  has  refused  to  assume 
the  vacuous  countenance  either  of  an  idol  or  a 
worshipper,  and  in  the  result  those  of  us  to  whom 
life  without  reverence  seems  like  life  in  ruins  are  filled 
at  times  with  a  wild  lust  to  denounce  and  belittle 
him.  He  has  been  called  more  names  than  any  other 
man  of  letters  alive.     When  all  the  other  names  have 

142 


MR.   BERNARD  SHAW  148 

been  exhausted  and  we  are  about  to  become  inarticulate, 
we  even  denounce  him  as  a  bore.  But  this  is  only  the 
Billingsgate  of  our  exasperation.  Mr.  Shaw  is  not  a 
bore,  whatever  else  he  may  be.  He  has  succeeded  in 
the  mere  business  of  interesting  us  beyond  any  other 
writer   of   his    time. 

He  has  succeeded  in  interesting  us  largely  by 
inventing  himself  as  a  public  figure,  as  Oscar  Wilde 
and  Stevenson  did  before  him.  Whether  he  could 
have  helped  becoming  a  figure,  even  if  he  had  never 
painted  that  elongated  comic  portrait  of  himself,  it 
is  difficult  to  say.  Probably  he  was  doomed  to  be  a 
figure  just  as  Dr.  Johnson  was.  If  he  had  not  told 
us  legends  about  himself,  other  people  would  have  told 
them,  and  they  could  scarcely  have  told  them  so  well  : 
that  would  have  been  the  chief  difference.  Even  if 
Mr.  Shaw's  plays  should  ever  become  as  dead  as  the 
essays  in  The  Rambler^  his  lineaments  and  his  laughter 
will  survive  in  a  hundred  stories  which  will  bring  the 
feet  of  pilgrims  to  Adelphi  Terrace  in  search  of  a 
ghost  Avith  its  beard  on   fire. 

His  critics  often  accuse  him,  in  regard  to  the  inven- 
tion of  the  Shaw  myth,  of  having  designed  a  poster 
rather  than  painted  a  portrait.  And  Mr.  Shaw  always 
hastens  to  agree  with  those  who  declare  he  is  an 
advertiser  in  an  age  of  advertisement.  M.  Hamon 
quotes  him  as  saying  : — 

Stop  advertising  myself !  On  the  contrary,  I  must  do  it  more 
than  ever.  Look  at  Pears's  Soap.  There  is  a  sohd  house  if  you 
Uke,  but  every  wall  is  still  plastered  with  their  advertisements. 
If  I  were  to  give  up  advertising,  my  business  would  immediately 
begin  to  fall  oft.  You  blame  me  for  having  declared  myself  to  be 
the  most  remarkable  man  of  my  time.  But  the  claim  is  an  argu- 
able one.     Why  should  I  not  say  it  when  I  believe  that  it  is  true  ? 

One  suspects  that  there  is  as  much  fun  as  commerce 
in  Mr.  Shaw's  advertisement.  Mr.  Shaw  would 
advertise  himself  in  this  sense  even  if  he  were  the 
inmate  of  a  workhouse.     He  is  something  of  a  natural 


144  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

peacock.  He  is  in  the  line  of  all  those  tramps  and 
stage  Irishmen  who  have  gone  through  life  with  so 
fine  a  swagger  of  Avords.  This  only  means  that  in 
his  life  he  is  an  artist. 

He  is  an  artist  in  his  life  to  an  even  greater  extent 
than    he    is    a   moralist    in   his    art.      The   mistake^  his 
depreciators    make,    however,    is    in    thinking    that    his 
story    ends   here.      The    truth   about   Mr.    Shaw   is   not 
quite   so   simple  as  that.      The   truth   about   Mr.   Shaw 
cannot  be  told  until  we  realize  that  he  is  an  artist,  not 
only  in  the  invention  of  his  own  life,  but  in  the  observa- 
tion  of   the   lives   of  other   people.      His   Broadbent  is 
as   wonderful   a   figure  as   his   George    Bernard   Shaw. 
Not   that   his   portraiture  is  always  faithful.      He   sees 
men  and  women  too  frequently  in  the  refracting  shallows 
of   theories.      He   is   a   doctrinaire,    and   his   characters 
are  often  comic  statements  of  his  doctrines  rather  than 
the  reflections  of  men  and  women.      "  When  I  present 
true   human  nature,"   he  observes   in  one  of  the  many 
passages    in   which   he   justifies   himself,    "  the   audience 
thinks  it  is  being  made  fun  of.     In  reality  I  am  simply 
a  very  careful  writer  of  natural  history."     One  is  bound 
to    contradict    him.       Mr.     Shaw    often    thinks    he    is 
presenting     true    human    nature    when    he    is     merely 
presenting  his  opinions  about  human  nature — the  human 
nature    of   soldiers,    of   artists,   of   women.      Or,    rather, 
when  he  is  presenting  a  queer  fizzing  mixture  of  human 
nature  and  his  opinions  about  it. 

This  may  be  sometimes  actually  a  virtue  in  his 
comedy.  Certainly,  from  the  time  of  Aristophanes 
onwards,  comedy  has  again  and  again  been  a  vehicle 
of  opinions  as  well  as  a  branch  of  natural  history. 
But  it  is  not  always  a  virtue.  Thus  in  The  Doctor^s 
Dilemma,  when  Dubedat  is  dying,  his  self-defence  and 
his  egoism  are  for  the  most  part  admirably  true  both 
to  human  nature  and  to  Mr.  Shaw's  view  of  the  human 
nature  of  artists.  But  when  he  goes  on  with  his  last 
breath  to  utter  his  artistic  creed  :   "I  behave  in  Michael 


MR.   BERNARD  SHAW  145 


Angelo,  Velasquez,  and  Rembrandt  ;  in  the  might  of 
design,  the  mystery  of  colour,  the  redemption  of  all 
things  by  Beauty  everlasting,  and  the  message  of  Art 
that  has  made  these  hands  blessed.  Amen,  Amen," 
these  sentences  are  no  more  natural  or  naturalistic 
than  the  death-bed  utterances  in  one  of  Mr.  G.  R. 
Sims's  ballads.  Dubedat  would  not  have  thought  these 
things,  he  would  not  have  said  these  things  ;  in  saying 
them  he  becomes  a  mere  mechanical  figure,  without 
any  admixture  of  humanity,  repeating  Mr.  Shaw's 
opinion  of  the  nature  of  the  creed  of  artists.  There 
is  a  similar  falsification  in  the  same  play  in  the  charac- 
terization of  the  newspaper  man  who  is  present  at 
Dubedat's  death  and  immediately  afterwards  is  anxious 
to  interview  the  widow.  "  Do  you  think,"  he  asks,  "  she 
would  give  me  a  few  words  on  '  How  it  Feels  to  be 
a  iWidow?  '  Rather  a  good  title  for  an  article,  isn't 
it?  "  These  sentences  are  bad  because  into  an  atmo- 
sphere of  more  or  less  naturalistic  comedy  they  simply 
introduce  a  farcical  exaggeration  of  Mr.  Shaw's 
opinion  of  the  incompetence  and  impudence  of 
journalists.  Mr.  Shaw's  comedies  are  repeatedly  injured 
by  a  hurried  alteration  of  atmosphere  in  this  manner. 
Comedy,  as  well  as  tragedy,  must  create  some  kind  of 
illusion,  and  the  destruction  of  the  illusion,  even  for 
the  sake  of  a  joke,  may  mean  the  destruction  of 
laughter.  But,  compared  with  the  degree  of  reality  in 
his  characterization,  the  proportion  of  unreality  is  not 
overwhelming.      It    has   been  enormously    exaggerated. 

After  all,  if  the  character  of  the  newspaper  man 
in  The  Doctor's  Dilemma  is  machine-made,  the  much 
more  important  character  of  B.  B.,  the  soothing  and 
incompetent  doctor,  is  a  creation  of  the  true  comic 
genius.  ,         "  i 

Nine  people  out  of  ten  harp  on  Mr.  Shaw's  errors. 
It  is  much  more  necessary  that  we  should  recognize 
that,  amid  all  his  falsifications,  doctrinal  and  jocular, 
he   has   a   genuine  comic   sense   of   character.      "  Most 

10 


146  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 


French  critics,"  M.  Hamon  tells  us  ...  "  declare  that 
Bernard  Shaw  does  depict  characters.  M.  Remy  de 
Gourmont  writes  :  '  MoHere  has  never  drawn  a  doctor 
more  comically  "  the  doctor  "  than  Paramore,  nor  more 
characteristic  figures  of  women  than  those  in  the  same 
play,  The  Philanderer.  The  character-drawing  is 
admirable.'  "  M.  Hamon  himself  goes  on,  however, 
to  suggest  an  important  contrast  between  the  character- 
ization in  Mr.  Shaw  and  the  characterization  in 
Moliere  : —  , 

In  Shaw's  plays  the  characters  are  less  representative  of  vices 
or  passions  than  those  of  MoliSre,  and  more  representative  of  class, 
profession,  or  sect.  Moliere  depicts  the  miser,  the  jealous  man, 
the  misanthrope,  the  hypocrite  ;  whereas  Shaw  depicts  the  bour- 
geois, the  rebel,  the  capitalist,  the  workman,  the  Socialist,  the 
doctor.     A  few  only  of  these  latter  types  are  given  us  by  Moliere. 

M.  Hamon 's  comparison,  made  in  the  course  of  a 
long  book,  between,  the  genius  of  Mr.  Shaw  and  the 
genius  of  Moliere  is  extraordinarily  detailed.  Perhaps 
the  detail  is  overdone  in  such  a  passage  as  that  which 
informs  us  regarding  the  work  of  both  authors  that 
"  suicide  is  never  one  of  the  central  features  of  the 
comedy  ;  if  mentioned,  it  is  only  to  be  made  fun  of." 
The  comparison,  however,  between  the  sins  that 
have  been  alleged  against  both  Moliere  and  Mr.  Shaw 
— sins  of  style,  of  form,  of  morals,  of  disrespect,  of 
irreligion,  of  anti-romanticism,  of  farce,  and  so  forth — 
is  a  suggestive  contribution  to  criticism,  I  am  not 
sure  that  the  comparison  would  not  have  been  more 
effectively  put  in  a  chapter  than  a  book,  but  it  is  only 
fair  to  remember  that  M.  Hamon's  book  is  intended 
as  a  biography  and  general  criticism  of  Mr.  Shaw 
as  well  .  as  a  comparison  between  his  work  and 
Moliere's.  It  contains,  it  must  be  confessed,  a  great 
deal  that  is  not  new  to  English  readers,  but  then  so 
do  all  books  about  Mr.  Shaw.  And  it  has  alsoi  this 
fault  that,  though  it  is  about  a  master  of  laughter, 
it  does  not  contain  even  the  shadow  of  a  smile.     Mr. 


MR.   BERNARD  SHAW  147 

Shaw  is  made  an  idol  in  spile  of  himself  :    M.  Hamon's 
volume  is  an  offering  at  a  shrine. 

The  true  things  it  contains,  however,  make  it  worth 
reading.  M.  Hamon  sees,  for  instance,  what  many  critics 
have  failed  to  see,  that  in  his  dramatic  work  Mr.  Shaw 
is  less  a  wit  than  a  humorist  : — 

In  Shaw's  work  we  find  few  studied  jests,  few  epigrams  even, 
except  those  which  are  the  necessary  outcome  of  the  characters 
and  the  situations.  He  does  not  labour  to  be  witty,  nor  does  he 
play  upon  words.  .  .  .  Shaw's  brilliancy  does  not  consist  in  wit, 
but  in  humour. 

Mr.  Shaw  was  at  one  time  commonly  regarded  as 
a  wit  of  the  school  of  Oscar  W-ilde.  That  view,  I 
imagine,  is  seldom  found  nowadays,  but  even  now  many 
people  do  not  realize  that  humour,  and  not  wit,  is  the 
ruling  characteristic  of  Mr.  Shaw's  plays.  He  is  not 
content  with  witty  conversation  about  life,  as  Wilde 
was  :    he  has  an  actual  comic  vision  of  human  society. 

His  humour,  it  is  true,  is  not  the  sympathetic  humour 
of  Elia  or  Dickens  ;  but  then  neither  was  Moli^re's. 
As  M.  Hamon  reminds  us,  Moliere  anticipated  Mr. 
Shaw  in  outraging  the  sentiment,  for  instance,  which 
has  gathered  round  the  family.  "  Moliere  and  Shaw," 
as  he  puts  it  with  quaint  seriousness,  "  appear  to  be 
unaware  of  what  a  father  is,  what  a  father  is  worth." 

The  defence  of  Mr.  Shaw,  however,  does  not  depend 
on  any  real  or  imaginary  resemblance  of  his  plays 
to  Moli^'rc's.  His  joy  and  his  misery  before  the 
ludicrous  spectacle  of  human  life  are  his  own,  and 
his  expression  of  them  is  his  own.  He  has  studied 
Avith  his  own  eyes  the  swollen-bellied  pretences  of 
preachers  and  poets  and  rich  men  and  lovers  and 
politicians,  and  he  has  derided  them  as  they  have 
never  been  derided  on  the  English  stage  before.  He 
has  derided  them  with  both  an  artistic  and  a  moral 
energy.  He  has  brought  them  all  into  a  Palace  of 
Truth,  where  thev  have  revealed  themselves  with  an 
unaccustomed   and   startling   frankness.      He   has   done 


148  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

this  sometimes  with  all  the  exuberance  of  mirth, 
sometimes  with  all  the  bitterness  of  a  satirist. 
Even  his  bitterness  is  never  venomous,  however.  He 
is  genial  beyond  the  majority  of  inveterate  contro- 
versialists and  propagandists.  He  does  not  hesitate 
to  wound  and  he  does  not  hesitate  to  misunderstand, 
but  he  is  free  from  malice.  The  geniality  of  his 
comedy,  on  the  other  hand,  is  often  more  offensive 
than  malice,  because  it  is  from  an  orthodox  point  of 
view  geniality  in  the  wrong  place.  It  is  like  a  gr'm 
in   church,  a  laugh  at  a  marriage  service. 

It  is  this  that  has  caused  all  the  trouble  about 
Mr.  Shaw's  writings  on  the  war.  He  saw,  not  the  war 
so  much  as  the  international  diplomacy  that  led  up 
to  the  war,  under  the  anti-romantic  and  satirical  comic 
vision.  I  do  not  mean  that  he  was  not  intensely  serious 
in  all  that  he  wrote  about  the  war.  But  his  seriousness 
is  essentially  the  seriousness  of  (in  the  higher  sense 
of  the  word)  the  comic  artist,  of  the  disillusionist.  He 
sees  current  history  from  the  absolutely  opposite  point 
of  view,  say,  to  the  lyric  poet.  He  was  so  occupied 
with  his  satiric  vision  of  the  pretences  of  the  diplomatic 
world  that,  though  his  attitude  to  the  war  was  as 
anti- Prussian  as  M.  Vandervelde's,  a  great  number  of 
people   thought  he  must  be   a  pro-German. 

The  fact  is,  in  war  time  more  than  at  any  other 
time,  people  dread  the  vision  of  the  satirist  and  the 
sceptic.  It  is  a  vision  of  only  one-half  of  the  truth, 
and  of  the  half  that  the  average  man  always  feels 
to  be  more  or  less  irrelevant.  And,  even  at  this,  it  is 
not  infallible.  This  is  not  to  disparage  Mr.  Shaw's 
contributions  to  the  discussion  of  politics.  That  con- 
tribution has  been  brilliant,  challenging,  and  humane, 
and  not  more  wayward  than  the  contribution  of  the 
partisan  and  the  sentimentalist.  It  may  be  said  of 
Mr.  Shaw  that  in  his  politics,  as  in  his  plays,  he  has 
sought  Utopia  along  the  path  of  disillusion  as  other  men 
have  sought  it  along  the  path  of  idealism  and  romance. 


XVII 
MR.    MASEFIELD'S    SECRET 

Mr.  Masefield,  as  a  poet,  has  the  secret  of  popu- 
larity. Has  he  also  the  secret  of  poetry?  I  confess 
his  poems  often  seem  to  me  to  invite  the  admirably 
just  verdict  which  Jeffrey  delivered  on  Wordsworth's 
Excursion  :  "  This  will  never  do."  We  miss  in  his 
lines  the  onward  march  of  poetry.  His  indi\  idual  phrases 
carry  no  cargoes  of  wonder.  His  art  is  not  of  the 
triumphant  order  that  lifts  us  off  our  feet.  As  we  read 
the  first  half  of  his  narrative  sea-poem,  Dauber,  we  are 
again  and  again  moved  to  impatience  by  the  sheer  literary 
left-handedness  of  the  author.  There  are  so  many  un- 
necessary words,  so  many  unnecessary  sentences.  Of 
the  latter  we  have  an  example  in  the  poet's  reflection 
as  he  describes  the  *'  fiery  fishes  "  that  raced  Dauber's 
ship  by  night  in  the  southern  seas  : — 

What  unknown  joy  was  in  those  fish  unknown  ! 

It  is  one  of  those  superfluous  thoughts  which  appear 
to  be  suggested  less  by  the  thing  described  than  by 
the  need  of  filling  up  the  last  line  of  the  verse. 
Similarly,  when  Dauber,  as  the  ship's  lampman  and 
painter  is  nicknamed,  regards  the  miracle  of  a  ship 
at   sea    in   moonlight,   and   exclaims  : — 

My  Lord,  my  God,  how  beautiful  it  is  ! 

we  feel  that  he  is  only  lengthening  into  a  measured 
line  the  "  My  God,  how  beautiful  it  is  !  "  of  prose. 
A  line  like  this,  indeed,  is  merely  prose  that  has  learned 
the   goose-step    of   poetry. 

149 


150  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Perhaps  one  would  not  resent  it — and  many  others 
like  it — so  much  if  it  were  not  that  Mr.  Masefield  so 
manifestly  aims  at  realism  of  effect.  His  narrative  is 
meant  to  be  as  faithful  to  commonplace  facts  as  a 
policeman's  evidence  in  a  court  of  law.  We  are  not 
spared  even  the  old  familiar  expletives.  When  Dauber's 
paintings,  for  example — for  he  is  an  artist  as  well  as 
an  artisan — have  been  destroyed  by  the  malice  of  the 
crew,   and  he   questions   the   Bosun  about    it, 

The  Bosun  turned  :   "  I'll  give  you  a  thick  ear  ! 
Do  it  ?     I  didn't.     Get  to  hell  from  here  !  " 

Similarly,  when  the  Mate,  taking  up  the  brush,  makes  a 
sketch  of  a   ship   for  Dauber's   better   instruction, 

"  God,  sir,"  the  Bosun  said,  "  You  do  her  fine  !  " 
"  Aye  !  "  said  the  Mate,  "  I  do  so,  by  the  Lord  !  " 

And    when    the    whole    crew    gathers    round    to    impress 
upon  Dauber  the  fact  of  his   incompetence, 

"  You  hear  ?  "  the  Bosun  cried,  "  You  cannot  do  it  !  " 
"A  gospel  truth,"  the  Cook  said,  "  true  as  hell  !  " 

Here,  obviously,  the  very  letter  of  realism  is  intended. 
Here,  too,  it  may  be  added,  we  have  as  well-meaning 
an  array  of  oaths  as  was  ever  set  out  in  literature. 
When  Mr.  Kipling  repeats  a  soldier's  oath,  he  seems 
to  do  so  with  a  chuckle  of  appreciation.  When  Mr. 
Masefield  puts  down  the  oaths  of  sailors,  he  does  so 
rather  as  a  melancholy  duty.  He  swears,  not  like  a 
trooper,  but  like  a  virtuous  man.  He  does  not,  as 
so  many  realists  do,  love  the  innumerable  coarsenesses 
of  life  which  he  chronicles  ;  that  is  what  makes  his 
oaths  often  seem  as  innocent  as  the  conversation  of 
elderly  sinners  echoed  on  the  lips  of  children.  He  has 
a  splendid  innocence  of  purpose,  indeed.  He  wishes 
to  give  us  the  prosaic  truth  of  actual  things  as  a  kind 
of  correspondence  to  the  poetic  truth  of  spiritual  things 
of   which   they   are   the   setting   and   the   frame.      Or  it 


MR.   MASEFIELD'S  SECRET  151 

may  be  that  he  repeats  these  oaths  and  all  the  rest  of 
it  simply  as  a  part  of  the  technicalities  of  life  at  sea. 

He  certainly  shows  a  passion  for  technicalities  hardly 
less  than  Mr.  Kipling's  own.  He  tells  us,  for  instance, 
how,  in  the  height  of  the  fury  of  frost  and  surge  and 
gale  round  Cape  Horn, 

at  last,  at  last 
They  frappcd  the  cringled  crojick's  icy  pelt  ; 
In  frozen  bulge  and  bunt  tliey  made  it  fast. 

And,  again,  when  the  storm  was  over  and  Dauber  had 
won  the  respect  of  his  mates  by  his  manhood,  we  have 
an  almost  unintelligible  verse  describing  how  the  Bosun, 
in  a  mood  of  friendship,  set  out  to  teach  him  some  of 
the    cunning    of    the    sea  : — 

Then,  while  the  Dauber  counted.  Bosun  took 

Some  marline  from  his  pocket.     "  Here,"  he  said, 

"  You  want  to  know  square  sennit  ?     So  fash.     Look  ! 

Eight  foxes  take,  and  stop  the  ends  with  thread. 

I've  known  an  engineer  would  give  his  head 

To  know  square  sennit."     As  the  Bose  began, 

The  Dauber  felt  promoted  to  a  man. 

Mr.  Maseficld  has  generously  provided  six  pages  of 
glossary  at  the  end  of  his  poem,  where  we  are  told  the 
meaning  of  "  futtock-shrouds,"  "  poop-break,"  "  scuttle- 
butt," "  mud-hooks,"  and  other  items  in  the  jargon  of 
the    sea. 

So  much  for  Mr.  Masefield's  literary  method.  Let 
me  be  equally  frank  about  his  genius,  and  confess  at 
once  that,  in  any  serious  estimate  of  this,  all  I  have 
said  will  scarcely  be  more  relevant  than  the  charge  against 
Burke  that  he  had  a  clumsy  delivery.  Mr.  Maseficld 
has  given  us  in  Dauber  a  poem  of  genius,  one  of  the 
great  storm -pieces  of  modern  literature,  a  poem  that 
for  imaginative  infectiousness  challenges  comparison  with 
the  prose  of  Mr.  Conrad's  Typhoon.  To  criticize  its 
style  takes  us  no  nearer  its  ultimate  secret  than  piling 
up  examples  of  bathos  takes  us  to  the  secret  of  Words- 


152  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

worth,  or  talking  about  maniacal  construction  and 
characterization  takes  us  to  the  secret  of  Dostoevsky. 
There  is  no  use  pretending  that  the  methods  of  these 
writers  are  good  because  their  achievements  are  good. 
On  the  other  hand,  compared  with  the  marvel  of  achieve- 
ment, the  faultiness  of  method  in  each  case  sinks  into 
a  matter  almost  of  indifference.  Mr.  Masefield  gives 
us  in  Dauber  a  book  of  revelation.  If  he  does  this  in 
verse  that  is  often  merely  prose  crooked  into  rhyme — if 
he  does  it  with  a  hero  who  is  at  first  almost  as  bowelless 
a  human  being  and  as  much  an  appeal  for  pity  as  Smike 
in  Nicholas  Nickleby — that  is  his  affair.  In  art,  more 
than  anywhere  else,  the  end  justifies  the  means,  and 
the  end  of  Dauber  is  vision— intense,  terrible,  pitiful, 
heroic  vision.  Here  we  have  in  literature  what  poor 
Dauber  himself  aimed  at  putting  down  on  his  inexpert 
canvases  : — 

A  revealing 
Of  passionate  men  in  battle  with  the  sea. 
High  on  an  unseen  stage,  shaking  and  reeling  ; 
And  men  through  him  would  understand  their  feeling, 
Their  might,  their  misery,  their  tragic  power. 
And  all  by  suffering  pain  a  little  hour. 

That  verse  suggests  both  the  kind  and  the  degree 
of  Mr.  Masefield's  sensitiveness  as  a  recorder  of  the 
life  of  the  sea.  His  is  the  witness  less  of  a  doer  than 
of  a  sufferer.  He  is  not  a  reveller  in  life  :  he  is  one, 
rather,  who  has  found  himself  tossed  about  in  the  foam- 
ing tides  of  anguish,  and  who  clings  with  a  desperate 
faith  to  some  last  spar  of  beauty  lOr  heroism.  He 
is  a  martyr  to  the  physical  as  well  as  to  the  spiritual 
pain  of  the  world.  He  communicates  to  us,  not  only 
the  horror  of  humiliation,  but  the  horror  of  a  numbed 
boy,  "  cut  to  the  ghost  "  by  the  polar  gale,  as  high 
in  the  yards  Dauber  fights  against  the  ship's  doom, 
having  been  ' 

ordered  up  when  sails  and  spars 
Were  flying  and  going  mad  among  the  stars, 


MR.   MASEFIELD'S  SECRET  153 

How  well,  too,  he  imparts  the  dread  and  the  danger 
of  the  coming  storm,  as  the  ship  gets  nearer  the  Horn  : 

All  through  the  windless  night  the  clipper  rolled 
In  a  great  swell  with  oily  gradual  heaves, 

Which  rolled  her  down  until  her  time-bells  tolled. 
Clang,  and  the  weltering  water  moaned  like  beeves. 

And  the  next  verse  reiterates  the  prophecies  of  the  moving 

waters  : 

Like  the  march  of  doom 
Came  those  great  powers  of  marching  silences  ; 
Then  fog  came  down,  dead-cold,  and  hid  the  seas. 

The  night  was  spent  in  dread  of  fog,  in  dread  of  ice, 
and  the  ship  seemed  to  respond  to  the  dread  of  the 
men  as  her  horn  called  out  into  the  impenetrable  wilder- 
ness of  mists  and  waters  : 

She  bayed  there  like  a  solitary  hound 
Lost  in  a  covert. 

Morning  came,   bringing  no   release  from   fear  : 

So  the  night  passed,  but  then  no  morning  broke — 
Only  a  something  showed  that  night  was  dead. 
A  sea-bird,  cackling  like  a  devil,  spoke. 
And  the  fog  drew  away  and  hung  like  lead. 
Like  mighty  cliffs  it  shaped,  sullen  and  red  ; 
Like  glowering  gods  at  watch  it  did  appear. 
And  sometimes  drew  away,  and  then  drew  near. 

Then  suddenly  swooped  down  the  immense  black  fiend 
of  the  storm,  catching,  as  the  Bosun  put  it,  the  ship 
**  in  her  ball-dress." 

The  blackness  crunched  all  memory  of  the  sun. 

Henceforth  we  have  a  tale  of  white  fear  changing 
into  heroism  as  Dauber  clambers  to  his  giddy  place 
in  the   rigging,   and  goes   out  on   the  yard  to  his  task, 

Sick  at  the  mighty  space  of  air  displayed 

Below  his  feet,  where  soaring  birds  were  wheeling. 


154  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

■  !■         !■    II  ■!■  Ill    ll^ll      I  ■!■—    IWI—I      ■     ■IllWIWiW      !■—  ■ ■!■!   ^1^  Ml^    MWIMir    ■!    I1IB   I       I  ■        I  II  I     !■      IM. 

It  was  all  a  "  withering  rush  of  death,"  an  orgy  of 
snow,   ice,  and  howling  seas. 

Tlie  snow  whiiled,  the  ship  bowed  to  it,  the  gear  lashed, 
The  sea-tops  were  cut  off  and  flung  down  smashed  ; 
Tatters  of  shouts  were  flung,  the  rags  of  j^ells — 
And  clang,  clang,  clang,  below  beat  the  two  bells. 

How  Inagnificent  a  flash  of  the  fury  of  the  storm  we 
get  when  the  Dauber  looks  down  from  his  scramblings 
among  rigging  and  snapped  spars,  and  sees  the  deck 

Filled  with  white  water,  as  though  heaped  with  snow. 

In  that  line  we  seem  to  behold  the  beautiful  face 
of  danger — a  beauty  that  is  in  some  way  complementary 
to  the  beauty  of  the  endurance  of  ships  and  the  en- 
durance of  men.  For  the  ship  is  saved,  and  so  is  the 
Dauber's  soul,  and  the  men  who  had  been  bullies  in 
hours  of  peace  reveal  themselves  as  heroes  in  stress 
and    peril. 

Dauber,  it  will  be  seen,  is  more  than  an  exciting  story 
of  a  storm.  It  is  a  spiritual  vision  of  life.  It  is  a 
soul's  confession.  It  is  Mr.  Masefield's  De  Profundls. 
It  is  a  parable  of  trial — a  chant  of  the  soul  that  has 
"  emerged  out  of  the  iron  time."  It  is  a  praise  of 
life,  not  for  its  own  sake,  but  for  the  spiritual  mastery 
which  its  storms  and  dangers  bring.  It  is  a  paean  of 
survival  :  the  ship  weathers  the  storm  to  go  boldly 
forward  again  : — 

A  great  grey  sea  was  running  up  the  sky. 
Desolate  birds  flew  past ;  their  mowings  came 
As  that  lone  water's  spiritual  cry, 
Its  forlorn  voice,  its  essence,  its  soul's  name. 
The  ship  limped  in  the  water  as  if  lame. 
Then,  in  the  forenoon  watch,  to  a  great  shout, 
More  sail  was  made,  the  reefs  were  shaken  out. 

Not  even  the  death  of  the  Dauber  in  a  wretched 
accident  defeats  our  sense  of  divine  and  ultimate  victory. 
To  some  readers  this  fatality  may  seem  a  mere  luxury 


MR.  MASEFIELD'S  SECRET  155 

of  pathos.  But  it  is  an  essential  part  of  the  scheme 
of  the  poem.  The  poet  must  state  his  acceptance  of 
life,  not  only  in  its  splendid  and  tragic  dangers,  but 
in  its  cruelty  and  pathetic  wastefulness.  He  must  know 
the  worst  of  it  in  order  to  put  the  best  of  it  to  the 
proof.  The  worst  passes,  the  best  continues — that  is 
the  secret  enthusiasm  of  Mr.  Masefield's  song.  Our 
final  vision  is  of  the  ship  in  safety,  holding  her  course 
to  harbour  in  a  fair  wind  : — 

Shattering  the  sea-tops  into  golden  rain. 

The  waves  bowed  down  before  her  Hke  blown  grain. 

And  as  she  sits  in  Valparaiso  harbour,  a  beautiful  thing 
at  peace  under  the  beautiful  shadow  of  "  the  mountain 
tower,  snow  to  the  peak,"  our  imagination  is  lifted  to 
the   hills — to   where 

All  night  long 
The  pointed  mountain  pointed  at  the  stars. 
Frozen,  alert,  au.stere. 

It  is  a  fine  symbol  of  the  aspiration  of  this  book  of 
men's  "  might,  their  misery,  their  tragic  power."  There 
is  something  essentially  Christian  and  simple  in  Mr. 
Masefield's  presentation  of  life.  Conscious  though  he 
is  of  the  pain  of  the  world — and  aloof  from  the  world 
though  this  consciousness  sometimes  makes  him  appear 
— he  is  full  of  an  extraordinary  pity  and  brotherliness 
for  men.  He  wanders  among  them,  not  with  the  con- 
descension of  so  many  earnest  writers,  but  with  the 
humility  almost  of  one  of  the  early  Franciscans.  One 
may  amuse  oneself  by  fancying  that  there  is  something 
in  the  manner  of  St.  Francis  even  in  Mr.  Masefield's 
attitude  to  his  little  brothers  the  swear-words.  He  may 
not  love  them  by  nature,  but  he  is  kind  to  them  by  grace. 
They  strike  one  as  being  the  most  innocent  swear-words 
in   literature.  '  ' 


XVIII 
MR.   W.    B.   YEATS 

1.  His  Own  Account  of  Himself 

Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats  has  created,  if  not  a  new  world,  a 
new  star.  He  is  not  a  reporter  of  life  as  it  is,  to 
the  extent  that  Shakespeare  or  Browning  is.  One  is 
not  quite  certain  that  his  kingdom  is  of  the  green  earth. 
He  is  like  a  man  who  has  seen  the  earth  not  directly  but 
in  a  crystal.  He  has  a  vision  of  real  things,  but  in 
unreal  circumstances.  His  poetry  repels  many  people 
at  first  because  it  is  unlike  any  other  poetry.  They  are 
suspicious  of  it  as  of  a  new  sect  in  religion.  They 
have  been  accustomed  to  bow  in  other  temples.  They 
resent  the  ritual,  the  incantations,  the  unearthly  light 
and  colour  of  the  temple  of  this  innovating  high  priest. 
They  resent,  most  of  all,  the  self-consciousness  of 
the  priest  himself.  For  Mr.  Yeats's  is  not  a  genius 
with  natural  readiness  of  speech.  His  sentences  do  not 
pour  from  him  in  stormy  floods.  It  is  as  though  he 
had  to  pursue  and  capture  them  one  by  one,  like  butter- 
flies. Or,  perhaps,  it  is  that  he  has  not  been  content 
with  the  simple  utterance  of  his  vision.  He  has  re- 
shaped and  embroidered  it,  and  has  sung  of  passion  in 
a  mask.  There  are  many  who  see  in  his  poetry  only 
the  mask,  and  who  are  apparently  blind  to  the  passion 
of  sorrowful  ecstasy  that  sets  The  Wind  Among  the  Reeds 
apart  from  every  other  book  that  has  ever  been  written 
in  English.  They  imagine  that  the  book  amounts  to 
little  more  than  the  attitude  of  a  stylist,  a  trifler  with 
Celtic  nomenclature  and  fairy  legend. 

15S 


MR.    W.   B.    YEATS  157 

One  may  agree  that  some  of  the  less -inspired  poems 
are  works  of  intellectual  craftsmanship  rather  than  of 
immediate  genius,  and  that  here  and  there  the  originality 
of  the  poet's  vision  is  clouded  by  reminiscences  of  the 
aesthetic  painters.  But  the  greatest  poems  in  the  book  are 
a  new  thing  in  literature,  a  "  rapturous  music  "  not  heard 
before.  One  is  not  surprised  to  learn  from  Mr.  Yeats's 
autobiographical  volume.  Reveries  over  Childhood  and 
Youth,  that,  when  he  began  to  write  poetry  as  a  boy, 
"  my  lines  but  seldom  scanned,  for  I  could  not  under- 
stand the  prosody  in  the  books,  although  there  were 
many  lines  that,  taken  by  themselves,  had  music."  His 
genius,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  was  unconsciously  seeking 
after  new  forms.  Those  who  have  read  the  first 
draft  of  Innisfree  will  remember  how  it  gives  one  the 
impression  of  a  new  imagination  stumbling  into  utterance. 
Mr.  Yeats  has  laboured  his  verse  into  perfect  music 
with  a  deliberateness  like  that  of  Flaubert  in  writing 
prose. 

Reveries  is  the  beautiful  and  fascinating  story  of  his 
childhood  and  youth,  and  the  development  of  his  genius. 
"  I  remember,"  he  tells  us,  "  little  of  childhood  but  its 
pain.  I  have  grown  happier  with  every  year  of  life,  as 
though  gradually  conquering  something  in  myself."  But 
there  is  not  much  of  the  shadow  of  pain  on  these  pages. 
They  are  full  of  the  portraits  of  fantastically  remembered 
relations  and  of  stories  of  home  and  school  related  with 
fantastic  humour.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  Mr. 
Yeats  as  a  schoolboy  "  followed  the  career  of  a  certain 
professional  runner  for  months,  buying  papers  that  would 
tell  me  if  he  had  won  or  lost,"  but  here  we  see  him 
even  in  the  thick  of  a  fight  like  a  boy  in  a  school  story. 
His  father,  however,  seems  to  have  had  infinitely  more 
influence  over  him  than  his  school  environment. 

It  was  his  father  who  grew  so  angry  when  the  infant 
poet  was  taught  at  school  to  sing  "  Little  drops  of  water," 
and  who  indignantly  forbade  him  to  write  a  school  essay 
on  the  subject  of  the  capacity  of  men  to  rise  on  stepping- 


158  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

stones  of  their  dead  selves  to  higher  things.  Mr.  Yeats's 
upbringing  in  the  home  of  an  artist  anti-Victorian  to 
the  finger-tips  was  obviously  such  as  would  lead  a  boy 
to  hve  self-consciously,  and  Mr.  Yeats  tells  us  that  when 
he  was  a  boy  at  school  he  used  to  feel  "  as  proud  of 
myself  as  a  March  cock  when  it  crows  to  its  first  sun- 
rise." He  remembers  how  one  day  he  looked  at  his 
schoolfellows  on  the  playing-field  and  said  to  himself, 
"  If  when  I  grow  up  I  am  as  clever  among  g'rown-up 
men  as  I  am  among  these  boys,  I  shall  be  a  famous 
man."  Another  sentence  about  these  days  suggests  what 
a  difficult  inarticulate  genius  was  his.  "  My  thoughts," 
he  says,  "  were  a  great  excitement,  but  when  I  tried 
to  do  anything  with  them,  it  was  Hke  trying  to  pack  a 
balloon  into  a  shed  in  a  high  wind." 

Though  he  was  always  near  the  bottom  of  his  class, 
and  was  useless  at  games—"  I  cannot,"  he  writes,  "  re- 
member that  I  ever  kicked  a  goal  or  made  a  run  " — he 
showed  some  promise  as  a  naturalist,  and  used  to  look 
for  butterflies,  moths,  and  beetles  in  Richmond  Park. 
Later,  when  living  on  the  Dublin  coast,  he  "  planned 
some  day  to  write  a  book  about  the  changes  through 
a  twelvemonth  among  the  creatures  of  some  hole  in 
the   rock." 

These  passages  in  his  autobiography  are  specially  in- 
teresting as  evidence  to  refute  the  absurd  theory  that 
Mr.  Yeats  is  a  mere  vague  day-dreamer  among  poets. 
The  truth  is,  Mr.  Yeats's  early  poems  show  that  he  was 
a  boy  of  eager  curiosity  and  observ^ation — a  boy  with  a 
remarkable  intellectual  machine,  as  well  as  a  visionary 
who  was  one  day  to  build  a  new  altar  to  beauty.  He 
has  never  been  entirely  aloof  from  the  common  world. 
Though  at  times  he  has  conceived  it  to  be  the  calling 
of  a  man  of  letters  to  live  apart  like  a  monk,  he  has 
mingled  with  human  interests  to  a  far  greater  extent 
than  most  people  realize.  He  has  nearly  always  been 
a  politician  and  always  a  fighter.  i 

At  the  same  time,  we  need  not  read  far  in  his  auto- 


MR.   W.   B.    YEATS  159 


biography  to  discover  why  people  who  hate  self- 
consciousness  in  artists  are  so  hostile  to   him. 

Reveries  Over  Childhood  and  Youth  is  the  auto- 
biography of  one  who  was  always  more  self-conscious 
than  his  fellows.  Mr.  Yeats  describes  himself  as  a 
youth    in   Dublin  : — 

sometimes  walking  with  an  artificial  stride  in  memory  of  Hamlet, 
and  stopping  at  shop  windows  to  look  at  my  tie,  gathered  into  a 
loose  sailor-knot,  and  to  regret  that  it  could  not  be  always  blown 
out  by  the  wind  like  Byron's  tie  in  the  picture. 

Even  the  fits  of  abstraction  of  the  young  poet  must 
often  have  been  regarded  as  self-conscious  attitud- 
inizing by  his  neighbours — especially  iby  the  "  stupid 
stout  woman  "  who  lived  in  the  villa  next  to  his  father's, 
and  who,  as  he  amusingly  relates,  mocked  him  aloud  : — 

I  had  a  study  with  a  window  opposite  some  window  of  hers, 
and  one  night  when  I  was  writing,  I  heard  voices  full  of  derision, 
and  saw  the  stout  woman  and  her  family  standing  at  the  window. 
1  have  a  way  of  acting  what  I  write,  and  speaking  it  aloud  without 
knowing  what  I  am  doing.  Perhaps  I  was  on  my  hands  and  knees, 
or  looking  down  over  the  back  of  a  chair,  talking  into  what  I 
imagined  an  abyss. 

It  will  be  seen  that  Mr.  Yeats  is  as  interesting 
a  figure  to  himself  as  he  is  to  Mir.  George  Moore. 
If  he  were  not  he  would  not  have  troubled  to  write  his 
autobiography.  And  that  would  have  been  a  loss  to 
literature.  Reveries  Over  Childhood  and  Youth  is  a 
book  of  extraordinary  freshness.  It  does  not,  like 
Wordsworth's  Prelude,  set  forth  the  full  account  of 
the  great  influences  that  shaped  a  poet's  career.  But 
it  is  a  delightful  study  of  early  influences,  and  depicts 
a  dedicated  poet  in  his  boyhood  as  this  lias  never 
been  done  before  in  English  prose. 

Of  all  the  influences  that  have  shaped  his  career, 
none  was  more  important  than  the  Irish  atmosphere 
to  which  he  early  returned  from  London.  He  is  dis- 
tinctively   an    Irish   poet,    though    we    find    him    in   his 


160  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 


youth  writing  plays  and  poems  in  imitation  of  Shelley 
and  Spenser.  Irish  places  have  done  more  to  influence 
his  imagination  even  than  the  masterpieces  of  English 
literature. 

It  was  apparently  while  he  was  living  in  Sligo,  not 
far  from  the  lakes,  that  he  conceived  the  longing  which 
he  afterwards  expressed  with  such  originality  of  charm  in 
J^he   Lake  Isle  of  Innisfree  : — 

My  father  had  read  to  me  some  passage  out  of  Walden,  and  I 
planned  to  live  some  day  in  a  cottage  on  a  little  island  called 
Innisfree.   .  .   . 

I  thought  that,  having  conquered  bodily  desire  and  the  inclin- 
ation of  my  mind  towards  women  and  love,  I  should  live  as  Thoreau 
lived,  seeking  wisdom. 

It  is  the  little  world  of  Sligo,  indeed,  that  provides 
all  the  spacious  and  twilit  landscape  in  Mr.  Yeats's 
verse.  Here  were  those  fishermen  and  raths  and 
mountains  of  the  Sidhe  and  desolate  lakes  which  repeat 
themselves  as  images  through  his  work.  Here,  too, 
he  had  relatives  eccentric  and  adventurous  to  excite 
his  imagination,  such  as  the 

Merchant  skipper  that  leaped  overboard 
After  a  ragged  hat  in  Biscay  Bay. 

Mr.  Yeats's  relations  seem  in  his  autobiography  as  real 
as  the  characters  in  fiction.  Each  of  them  is  mag- 
nificently stamped  with  romance  or  comedy — the 
hypochondriac  uncle,  for  example,  who — 

passed  from  winter  to  summer  through  a  series  of  woollens  that 
had  always  to  be  weighed  ;  for  in  April  or  May,  or  whatever  the 
date  was,  he  had  to  be  sure  that  he  carried  the  exact  number  of 
ounces  he  had  carried  upon  that  date  since  boyhood. 

For  a  time  Mr.  Yeats  thought  of  following  his  father's 
example  and  becoming  a  painter.  It  was  while  attend- 
ing an  art  school  in  Dublin  that  he  first  met  A.  E. 
He  gives  us  a  curious  description  of  A.  E.  as  he  was 
then  : — 


MR.    W.   B.    YEATS  161 

He  did  not  paint  the  model  as  we  tried  to,  for  some  other  image 
rose  always  before  his  eyes  (a  St.  John  in  the  Desert  I  remember), 
and  already  he  spoke  to  us  of  his  visions.  His  conversation,  so 
lucid  and  vehement  to-day,  was  all  but  incomprehensible,  though 
now  and  again  some  phrase  could  be  understood  and  repeated. 
One  day  he  announced  that  he  was  leaving  the  Art  Schools  because 
his  will  was  weak,  and  the  arts  or  any  other  emotional  pursuit 
would  but  weaken  it  further. 

Mr.  Yeats's  memoirs,  however,  are  not  confined  to 
prose.  His  volume  of  verse  called  Responsibilities 
is  almost  equally  autobiographical.  Much  of  it  is  a 
record  of  quarrels  with  contemporaries — quarrels  about 
Synge,  about  Hugh  Lane  and  his  pictures,  about  all 
sorts  of  things.  He  aims  barbed  epigrams  at  his 
adversaries.  Very  Yeatsian  is  an  epigram  "  to  a  poet, 
who  would  have  me  praise  certain  bad  poets,  imitators 
of  his  and  mine  "  : — 

You  say,  as  I  have  often  given  tongue 

In  praise  of  what  another's  said  or  sung, 

'Twere  politic  to  do  the  like  by  these  ; 

But  have  you  known  a  dog  to  praise  his  fleas  ? 

In    an    earlier    version,    the    last    line    was    still    more 
arrogant  : —  , 

But  Where's  the  wild  dog  that  has  praised  his  fleas  ? 

There    is   a  noble  arrogance  again  in   the   lines   called 
A   Goat  : — 

I  made  my  song  a  coat. 

Covered  with  embroideries, 

Out  of  old  mythologies. 

From  heel  to  throat. 

But  the  fools  caught  it. 

Wore  it  in  the  world's  eye, 

As  though  they'd  wrought  it. 

Song,  let  them  take  it. 

For  there's  more  enterprise 

In  walking  naked. 

Mr.  Yeats  still  gives  some  of  his  songs  the  old 
embroidered  vesture.     But  his  work  is  now  more  frankly 

11 


162  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 

personal  than  it  used  to  be— at  once  harsher  and  simpler. 
One   would   not   give    Responsibilities   to   a   reader   who 
knew    nothing   of    Mr.    Yeats's    previous    work.      There 
is    too   much    raging    at    the   world    in   it,    too    little   of 
the  perfected  beauty  of  The  Wind  Among  the   Reeds. 
One    finds   ugly  words   Hke   "  wive  "   and   "  thigh  "   in- 
opportunely used,  and  the  retort  to  Mr.  George  Moore's 
Hail    and    Farewell,    though    legitimately    offensive,    is 
obscure  in  statement.      Still,  there  is  enough  beauty  in 
the  book  to  make  it  precious  to  the  lover  of  literature. 
An    Elizabethan    might    have    made    the    music    of    the 
first  verse  of  A  Woman  Homer  Sung. 

And  what  splendour  of  praise  and  censure  Mr.  Yeats 
gives  us  in   The  Second  Troy  : — 

Why  should  I  blame  her,  that  she  filled  my  days 

With  misery,  or  that  she  would  of  late 
Have  taught  to  ignorant  men  most  violent  ways. 

Or  hurled  the  little  streets  against  the  great, 
Had  they  but  courage  equal  to  desire  ? 

What  could  have  made  her  peaceful  with  a  mind 
That  nobleness  made  simple  as  a  lire. 

With  beauty  like  a  tightened  bow,  a  kind 
That  is  not  natural  in  an  age  like  this. 

Being  high  and  solitary,  and  most  stern  ? 
Why,  what  could  she  have  done,  being  what  she  is  ? 

Was  there  another  Troy  for  her  to  burn  ? 

It  is  curious  to  note  in  how  much  of  his  verse 
Mr.  Yeats  repeats  his  protest  against  the  poHtical 
passion  of  Ireland  which  once  meant  so  much  to  him. 
All  Things  can  Tempt  Me  expresses  this  artistic  mood 
of   revolt   with   its   fierce   beginning  : — 

All  things  can  tempt  me  from  this  craft  of  verse  ; 
One  time  it  was  a  woman's  face,  or  worse. 
The  seeming  needs  of  my  fool-driven  land. 

Som-e  of  the  most  excellent  pages  of  Reveries,  however, 
are  those  which  recall  certain  fam.ous  figures  in  Irish 
Nationalism  like  John  O'Leary  and  J.  F.  Taylor,  the 
orator  whose  temper  so  stood  in  his  way. 


3IR.    W.   B.    YEATS  168 

Mr.  Yeats  recalls  a  wonderful  speech  Taylor  once 
made  at  a  (meeting  in  Dublin  at  which  a  Lord  Chancellor 
had  apparently  referred  in  a  belittling  way  to  Irish 
nationality  and  the  Irish  language  : 

Taylor  began  hesitating  and  stopping  for  words,  but  after  speak- 
ing very  badly  for  a  little,  straightened  his  figure  and  spoke  as 
out  of  a  dream  :  "  I  am  carried  to  another  age,  a  nobler  court,  and 
another  Lord  Chancellor  is  speaking.  I  am  at  the  court  of  the 
first  Pharaoh."  Thereupon  he  put  into  the  mouth  of  that  Egyptian 
all  his  audience  had  listened  to,  but  now  it  was  spoken  to  the 
children  of  Israel.  "  If  you  have  any  spirituality  as  you  boast, 
why  not  use  our  great  empire  to  spread  it  through  the  world,  why 
still  cling  to  that  beggarly  nationality  of  yours  ?  what  are  its  history 
and  its  works  weighed  with  those  of  Egypt  ?  "  Then  his  voice 
changed  and  sank  :  "  I  see  a  man  at  the  edge  of  the  crowd  ;  he 
is  standing  listening  there,  but  he  will  not  obey  "  ;  and  then,  with 
his  voice  rising  to  a  cry,  "  had  he  obeyed  he  would  never  have  come 
down  the  mountain  carrying  in  his  arms  the  tables  of  the  Law  in 
the  language  of  the  outlaw." 

That  Mr.  Yeats,  in  spite  of  his  secession  from  politics, 
loves  the  old  passionate  Ireland,  is  clear  from  the  poem 
called  September,  1913,  with  its  refrain  : — 

Romantic  Ireland's  dead  and  gone 
And  with  O'Leary  in  the  grave. 

And  to  this  Mr.  Yeats  has  since  added  a  significant 
note  : — 

"  Romantic  Ireland's  dead  and  gone  "  sounds  old-fashioned 
now.  It  seemed  true  in  1913,  but  I  did  not  foresee  191b.  The 
late  Dublin  Rebellion,  whatever  one  may  say  of  its  wisdom,  will 
long  be  remembered  for  its  heroism.  "  They  weighed  so  lightly 
what  they  gave,"  and  gave,  too,  in  some  cases  without  hope  of 
success. 

Mr.  Yeats  is  by  nature  a  poet  of  the  heroic  world — 
a  hater  of  the  burgess  and  of  the  till.  He  boasts 
in    Responsibilities   of   ancestors  who   left   him 

blood 
That  has  not  passed  through  any  huckster's  loin. 


164  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

There  may  be  a  good  deal  of  vanity  and  gesticulation 
in  all  this,  but  it  is  the  vanity  and  gesticulation  of  a' 
man  of  genius.  As  we  cannot  have  the  genius  of  Mr. 
Yeats  without  the  gestures,  we  may  as  well  take  the 
gestures  in  good  part. 


2.  His  Poetry 

It  is  distinctly  surprising  to  find  Mr.  Yeats  compared 
to   Milton  and   Jeremy  Taylor,   and   Mr.    Forrest   Reid, 
who   makes   the  comparison,  does  not  ask  us   to  apply 
it  at  all  points.     There  is  a  remoteness  about  Milton's 
genius,    however,    an    austere    and    rarefied    beauty,    to 
which  Mr.  Reid  discovers  certain  likenesses  in  the  work 
of  Mr.   Yeats.      Mr.  Yeats  is  certainly  a  little  remote. 
He    is    so    remote    that    some    people    regard    his    work 
with  mixed  feelings,   as  a   rather  uncanny   thing.      The 
reason   may  partly  be  that   Mr.    Yeats   is   not  a  singer 
in    the   ordinary    tradition    of    poets.      His    poems    are 
incantations  rather  than  songs.     They  seem  to  call  for 
an    order    of    priests    and    priestesses    to    chant    them. 
There  are  one  or  two  of  his  early  poems,  like  Down  by, 
the   Sally  Garden^   that  might   conceivably   be   sung  at 
a  fair  or  even  at  a  ballad-concert.     But,  as  Mr.  Yeats 
has    grown    older,    he    has    become    more    and    more 
determinedly   the  magician  in  his   robes.      Even  in  his 
prose   he   does  not  lay   aside   his    robes  ;     it   is   written 
in     the     tones     of     the     sanctuary  :      it     is     prose     for 
worshippers.      To  such  an  extent   is  this  so  that  many 
who    do   not    realize   that    Mr.    Yeats    is    a   great   artist 
cannot  read  much  of  his  prose  without  convincing  them- 
selves that  he  is  a  great  humbug.     It  is  easy  to  under- 
stand   how    readers    accustomed    to    the    rationalism    of 
the    end    of    the    century    refused    to    take    seriously    a 
poet  who  wrote   "  spooky  "  explanations  of  his   poems, 
such    as    Mr.    Yeats   wrote    in    his    notes    to    The    Wind 
Among  the  Reeds^  the  most  entirely  good  of  his  books. 
Consider,    for    example,    the   note    which    he    wrote   on 


MR.   W.   B.    YEATS  1G5 

that  charming  if  somewhat  perplexing  poem.  The  Jester. 
"  I    dreamed,"  Writes  Mr.   Yeats  : — 

I  dreamed  this  story  exactly  as  I  have  written  it,  and  dreamed 
another  long  dream  after  it,  trying  to  make  out  its  meaning,  and 
whether  I  was  to  write  it  in  prose  or  verse.  The  first  dream  waa 
more  a  vision  than  a  dream,  for  it  was  beautiful  and  coherent, 
and  gave  me  a  sense  of  illumination  and  exaltation  that  one  gets 
from  visions,  while  the  second  dream  was  confused  and  meaning- 
less. The  poem  has  always  meant  a  great  deal  to  me,  though, 
as  is  the  way  with  symbolic  poems,  it  has  not  always  meant  quite 
the  same  thing.  Blake  would  have  said,  "  The  authors  are  in 
eternity  "  ;  and  I  am  quite  sure  they  can  only  be  questioned  in 
dreams. 

Why,  even  those  of  us  who  count  Mr.  Yeats  one  of 
the  immortals  while  he  is  still  alive,  are  inclined  to 
shy  at  a  claim  at  once  so  solemn  and  so  irrational 
as  this.  It  reads  almost  like  a  confession  of  witch- 
craft. 

Luckily,  Mr.  Yeats's  commerce  with  dreams  and 
fairies  and  other  spirits  has  not  all  been  of  this  evidential 
and  disputable  kind.  His  confessions  do  not  convince 
us  of  his  magical  experiences,  but  his  poems  do.  Here 
we  have  the  true  narrative  of  fairyland,  the  initiation 
into  other-worldly  beauty.  Here  we  have  the  magician 
crying  out  against 

All  things  uncomely  and  broken,  all  things  worn  out  and  old, 

and  attempting  to  invoke  a  new-^or  an  old — and  more 
beautiful  world  into  being. 

The  wrong  of  unshapely  things  is  a  wrong  too  great  to  be  told, 

he  cries,  and  over  against  the  unshapely  earth  he  sets 
up  the  "  happy  townland  "  of  which  he  sings  in  one 
of  his  later  and  most  lovely  poems.  It  would  not  be 
easy  to  write  a  prose  paraphrase  of  The  Happy, 
Townland,  but  who  is  there  who  can  permanently  resist 
the  spell  of  this  poem,  especially  of  the  first  verse 
and  its  refrain? — 


IGG  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 


There's  many  a  strong  farmer 
Whose  heart  would  break  in  two. 
If  he  could  see  the  tovvnland 
That  we  are  riding  to  ; 
Boughs  have  their  fruit  and  blossom 
At  all  times  of  the  year  ; 
Rivers  are  running  over 
With  red  beer  and  brown  beer. 
An  old  man  plays  the  bagpipes 
In  a  golden  and  silver  wood  ; 
Queens,  their  eyes  blue  like  the  ice. 
Are  dancing  in  a  crowd. 

The  little  fox  he  murmured, 
"  O  what  of  the  world's  bane  ?  " 
The  sun  was  laughing  sweetly, 
The  moon  plucked  at  my  rein  ; 
But  the  little  red  fox  murmured, 
"  O,  do  not  pluck  at  his  rein, 
He  is  riding  to  the  townland 
That  is  the  world's  bane." 

You  may  interpret  the  little  red  fox  and  the  sun  and 
the  moon  as  you  please,  but  is  it  not  all  as  beautiful 
as  the  ringing  of  bells? 

But  Mr.  Yeats,  in  his  desire  for  this  other  world 
of  colour  and  music,  is  no  scorner  of  the  everyday  earth. 
His  early  poems  especially,  as  Mr.  Reid  points  out, 
give  evidence  of  a  wondering  observ-ation  of  Nature 
almost  iWordsworthian.  In  The  Stolen  Child,  which 
tells  of  a  human  child  that  is  enticed  away  by  the 
fairies,  the  magic  of  the  earth  the  child  is  leaving  is 
the  means  by  which  Mr.  Yeats  suggests  to  us  the  magic 
of  the  world  into  which  it  is  going,  as  in  the,  last  verse 
of   the  poem  : — 

Away  with  us  he's  going. 

The  solemn  eyed  : 

He'll  hear  no  more  the  lowing 

Of  the  calves  on  the  warm  hillside  ; 

Or  the  kettle  on  the  hob 

Sing  peace  into  his  breast. 

Or  see  the  brown  mice  bob 

Round  and  round  the  oatmeal-chest. 


MR.    W.   B.    YEATS  167 

For  he  comes,  the  human  child. 
To  the  ivaters  and  the  wild 
With  a  faery,  hand  in  hand. 
From  a  world  more  full  of  weeping  than  he  can 
understand. 

There  is  no  painting  here,  no  adjective-work.  But  no 
painting  or  adjectives  could  better  suggest  all  that  the 
world  and  the  loss  of  the  world  mean  to  an  imaginative 
child  than  this  brief  collection  of  simple  things.  To 
read  The  Stolen  Child  is  to  realize  both  that  Mr.  Yeats 
brought  a  new  and  delicate  music  into  literature  and 
that  his  genius  had  its  birth  in  a  sense  of  the  beauty 
of  common  things.  Even  when  in  his  early  poems  the 
adjectives  seem  to  be  chosen  with  the  too  delicate  care 
of  an  artist,  as  when  he  notes  how — 

in  autumnal  solitudes 
Arise  the  leopard-coloured  trees, 

his  observation  of  the  world  about  him  is  but  proved 
the  more  conclusively.  The  trees  in  autumn  are  leopard- 
coloured,  though  a  poet  cannot  say  so  without  becoming 
dangerously  ornamental. 

What  I  have  written  so  far,  however,  might  convey 
the  impression  that  in  Mr.  Yeats's  poetry  we  have 
a  child's  rather  than  a  man's  vision  at  work.  One 
might  even  gather  that  he  was  a  passionless  singer  with 
his  head  in  the  moon.  This  is  exactly  the  misunder- 
standing which  has  led  many  people  to  think  of  him 
as  a  minor  poet. 

The  truth  is  Mr.  Yeats  is  too  original  and,  as  it  were, 
secret  a  poet  to  capture  all  at  once  the  imagination 
that  has  already  fixed  the  outlines  of  its  kingdom  amid 
the  masterpieces  of  literature.  His  is  a  genius  outside 
the  landmarks.  There  is  no  prototype  in  Shelley  lOr 
Keats,  any  more  than  there  is  in  Shakespeare,  for  such 
a  poem  as  that  which  was  at  first  called  Breasal  the 
Fisherman,   but    is   now  called   simply    The   Fisherman : 

Although  you  hide  in  the  ebb  and  flow 
Of  the  pale  tide  when  the  moon  has  set, 


168  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

The  people  of  coming  days  will  know 

About  the  casting  out  of  my  net. 

And  how  you  have  leaped  times  out  of  mind 

Over  the  little  silver  cords. 

And  think  that  you  were  hard  and  unkind. 

And  blame  you  with  many  bitter  words. 

There,  in  music  as  simple  as  a  fable  of  ^sop,  Mr. 
Yeats  has  figured  the  pride  of  genius  and  the  passion  of 
defeated  love  in  words  that  are  beautiful  in  themselves, 
but  trebly  beautiful  in  their  significances. 

Beautifully  new,  again,  is  the  poem  beginning,  "  I 
wander  by  the  edge,"  which  expresses  the  desolation 
of  love  as  it  is  expressed  in  few  modern  poems  : 

I  wander  by  the  edge 

Of  this  desolate  lake 

Where  wind  cries  in  the  sedge  : 

Until  the  axle  break 

That  keeps  the  stars  in  their  round 

And  hands  hurl  in  the  deep 

The  banners  of  East  and  West 

And  the  girdle  of  light  is  unbound. 

Your  breast  will  not  lie  by  the  breast 

Of  your  beloved  in  sleep. 

Rhythms  like  these  did  not  exist  in  the  English 
language  until  Mr.  Yeats  invented  them,  and  their  very 
novelty  concealed  for  a  time  the  passion  that  is  immortal 
in  them.  It  is  by  now  a  threadbare  saying  of  Wordsworth 
that  every  great  artist  has  himself  to  create  the  taste 
by  which  he  is  enjoyed,  but  it  is  worth  quoting  once 
more  because  it  is  especially  relevant  to  a  discussion  of 
the  genius  of  Mr.  Yeats.  What  previous  artist,  for 
example,  had  created  the  taste  which  would  be  pre- 
pared to  respond  imaginatively  to  such  a  revelation  of 
a  lover's  triumph  in  the  nonpareil  beauty  of  his  mistress 
as  we  have  in  the   poem  that  ends  : — 

I  cried  in  my  dream,  "  O  women  bid  the  young  men  lay 
Their  heads  on  your  knees,  and  drown  their  eyes  with  your  hair, 
Or  remembering  hers  they  will  find  no  other  face  fair 
Till  all  the  valleys  of  the  world  have  been  withered  away." 


MR.    W.   B.    YEATS  1G9 

One  may  doubt  at  times  whether  Mr.  Yeats  does 
not  too  consciously  show  himself  an  artist  of  the  aesthetic 
school  in  some  of  his  epithets,  such  as  "  cloud-pale  " 
and  "  dream-dimmed."  His  too  frequent  repetition  of 
similar  epithets  makes  woman  stand  out  of  his  poems 
at  times  like  a  decoration,  as  in  the  pictures  of  Rossetti 
and  Bume- Jones,  rather  than  in  the  vehement  beauty  of 
life.  It  is  as  if  the  passion  in  his  verse  were  again 
and  again  entangled  in  the  devices  of  art.  If  we  take 
his  love-poems  as  a  whole,  however,  the  passion  in  them 
is  at  once  vehement  and  beautiful. 

The  world  has  not  yet  sufficiently  realized  how  deep 
is  the  passion  that  has  given  shape  to  Mr.  Yeats's  verse. 
The  Wind  Among  the  Reeds  is  a  book  of  love-poetry 
quite  unlike  all  other  books  of  love-poetry.  It  utters  the 
same  moods  of  triumph  in  the  beloved's  beauty,  of  despair, 
of  desire,  of  boastfulness  of  the  poet's  immortality,  that 
we  find  in  the  love-poetry  of  other  ages.  But  here  are 
new  images,  almost  a  new  language.  Sometimes  we 
have  an  image  which  fills  the  mind  like  the  image  in 
some  little  Chinese  lyric,  as  in  the  poem  He  Reproves 
the  Curlew  : — 

O,  curlew,  cry  no  more  in  the  air. 

Or  only  to  the  waters  of  the  West  ; 

Because  your  crying  brings  to  my  mind 

Passion-dimmed  eyes  and  long  heavy  hair 

That  was  shaken  out  over  my  breast : 

There  is  enough  evil  in  the  crying  of  the  wind. 

This  passion  of  loss,  this  sense  of  the  beloved  as 
of  something  secret  and  far  and  scarcely  to  be  attained, 
like  the  Holy  Grail,  is  the  dominant  theme 'of  the  poems, 
even  in  The  Song  of  Wandering  Aengus,  that  poem 
of  almost  playful  beauty,  which  tells  of  the  "  little  silver 
trout  "  that  became 

a  glimmering  girl 


With  apple  blossom  in  her  hair. 
Who  called  me  by  my  name  and  ran 
And  faded  through  the  brightening  air. 


170  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

WhcLt  a  sense  of  long  pursuit,  of  a  life's  quest,  we  get 
in  the  exquisite  last  verse — a  verse  which  must  be  among 
the  best-known  of  Mr.  Yeats's  writings  after  The  Lake 
Isle  of  Innisfree  and  Had  I  the  Heai^en's  Embroidered 
Cloths  :— 

Though  I  am  old  with  wandering 
Through  hollow  lands  and  hilly  lands, 
I  will  find  out  where  she  has  gone. 
And  kiss  her  lips  and  take  her  hands  ; 
And  walk  among  long  dappled  grass, 
And  pluck  till  time  and  times  are  done 
The  silver  apples  of  the  moon. 
The  golden  apples  of  the  sun. 

This  is  the  magic  of  fairyland  again.  It  seems  a 
little  distant  from  human  passions.  It  is  a  wonderful 
example,  however,  of  Mr.  Yeats's  genius  for  transform- 
ing passion  into  elfin  dreams.  The  emotion  is  at 
once  deeper  and  nearer  human  experience  in  the  later 
poem  called  The  Folly  of  Being  Comforted.  I  have 
known  readers  who  professed  to  find  this  poem  obscure. 
To  me  it  seems  a  miracle  of  phrasing  and  portraiture. 
I  know  no  better  example  of  the  nobleness  of  Mr.  Yeats's 
verse  and  his   incomparable  music. 


XIX 
TCHEHOV:    THE    PERFECT    STORY-TELLER 

It  is  the  custom  when  praising  a  Russian  writer  to  do 
so  at  the  expense  of  all  other  Russian  writers.  It  is 
as  though  most  of  us  were  monotheists  in  our  devotion 
to  authors,  and  could  not  endure  to  see  any  respect 
paid  to  the  rivals  of  the  god  of  the  moment.  And  so 
one  year  Tolstoy  is  laid  prone  as  Dagon,  and,  another 
year,  Turgenev.  And,  no  doubt,  the  day  will  come 
when  Dostoevsky  will  fall  from  his  huge  eminence. 

Perhaps  the  luckiest  of  all  the  Russian  authors  in 
this  respect  is  Tchehov.  He  is  so  obviously  not  a  god. 
He  does  not  deliver  messages  to  us  from  the  mountain- 
top  like  Tolstoy,  or  reveal  himself  beautifully  in  sunset 
and  star  like  Turgenev,  or  announce  himself  now  in  the 
hurricane  and  now  in  the  thunderstorm  like  Dostoevsky. 
He  is  a  man  and  a  medical  doctor.  He  pays  professional 
visits.  We  may  define  his  genius  more  exactly  by  say- 
ing that  his  is  a  general  practice.  There  has,  I  think, 
never  been  so  wonderful  an  examination  of  common 
people  in  literature  as  in  the  short  stories  of  Tchehov. 
His  world  is  thronged  with  the  average  man  and  the 
average  woman.  Other  writers  have  also  put  ordinary 
people  into  books.  They  have  written  plays  longer  than 
'Hamlet,  and  novels  longer  than  Don  Quixote,  about 
ordinary  people.  They  have  piled  such  a  heap  of  details 
on  the  ordinary  man's  back  as  almost  to  squash  him  out 
of  existence.  In  the  result  the  reader  as  well  as  the 
ordinary  man  has  a  sense  of  oppression.  He  begins 
to  long  for  the  restoration  of  the  big  subject  to 
literature. 

171 


172  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 


Henry  James  complained  of  the  littleness  of  the  sub- 
ject in  Madame '  Bovary.  He  regarded  it  as  one  of 
the  miracles  of  art  that  so  great  a  book  should  have 
been  written  about  so  small  a  woman.  Tom  Jones,  on 
the  other  hand,  is  a  portrait  of  a  common  man  of  the  size 
of  which  few  people  complain.  But  then  Tom  Jones  is 
a  comedy,  and  we  enjoy  the  continual  relief  of  laughter. 
It  is  the  tragic  realists  for  whom  the  common  man  is 
a  theme  so  perilous  in  its  temptations  to  dullness.  At 
the  same  time  he  is  a  theme  that  they  were  bound  to 
treat.  He  is  himself,  indeed,  the  sole  source  and  subject 
of  tragic  realism  in  literature.  Were  it  not  for  the 
oppression  of  his  futile  and  philoprogenitive  presence, 
imaginative  writers   would  be  poets   and   romancers. 

The  problem  of  the  novelist  of  contemporary  life  for 
whom  ordinary  people  are  more  intensely  real  than  the 
few  magnificent  personalities  is  how  to  portray  ordinary 
people  in  such  a  way  that  they  will  become  better  com- 
pany than  they  are  in  life.  Tchehov,  I  think,  solves 
the  problem  better  than  any  of  the  other  novelists.  He 
sees,  for  one  thing,  that  no  man  is  uninteresting  when 
he  is  seen  as  a  person  stumbling  towards  some  goal,  just 
as  no  man  is  uninteresting  when  his  hat  is  blown  off 
and  he  has  to  scuttle  after  it  down  the  street.  There 
is  bound  to  be  a  break  in  the  meanest  life. 

Tchehov  will  seek  out  the  key  situation  in  the  life  of 
a  cabman  or  a  charwoman,  and  make  them  glow  for 
a  brief  moment  in  the  tender  light  of  his  sympathy.  He 
does  not  run  sympathy  as  a  "  stunt  "  like  so  many 
popular  novelists.  He  sympathizes  merely  in  the  sense 
that  he  understands  in  his  heart  as  well  as  in  his  brain. 
He  has  the  most  unbiassed  attitude,  I  think,  of  any 
author  in  the  world.  Mr.  Edward  Garnett,  in  his  intro- 
duction to  Mrs.  Garnett's  translation  of  Tchehov's  tales, 
speaks  admirably  of  his  "  profundity  of  acceptation." 
There  is  no  writer  who  is  less  inclined  to  use  italics 
in  his  record  of  human  life.  Perhaps  Mr.  Garnett  goes 
too   far  when  he  says   that   Tchehov   "  stands  close  to 


TCHEHOV  :   THE  PERFECT  STORY-TELLER     173 


all  his   characters,   watching  them   quietly   and   register- 
ing  their   circumstances   and  feelings   with    such    finality 
that  to  pass  judgment  on  them  appears  supererogatory." 
Tchehov's   judgment   is   at  times   clear  enough— as  clear 
as   if  it  followed  a  summing-up  from   the  bench.      He 
portrays  his  characters   instead  of   labelling  them  ;     but 
the  portrait  itself  is  the  judgment.      His  humour  makes 
him  tolerant,  but,  though  he  describes  moral  and  material 
ugliness  with  tolerance,  he  never  leaves  us  in  any  doubt 
as  to  their  being  ugly.      His  attitude  to  a  large  part  of 
Hfe  might  be  described  as  one  of  good-natured  disgust. 
In    one    of    the   newly-translated    stories,    Ariadne,    he 
shows  us  a  woman  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  disgusted 
lover.      It  is  a  sensitive  man's  picture  of  a  woman  who 
was    even    more    greedy    than    beautiful.       "  This    thirst 
for    personal    success    .     .     .    makes    people    cold,    and 
Ariadne    was    cold— to    me,    to    nature,    and    to  music." 
Tchehov   extends    towards    her   so    little   charity   that  he 
makes  her  run  away  to  Italy  with  a  bourgeois  who  had 
"  a  neck  like  goose-skin  and  a  big  Adam's  apple,"  and 
who,  as  he  talked,  "  breathed  hard,  breathing  straight  in 
my   face   and   smelling  of   boiled    beef."      As   the   more 
sensitive  lover  who  supplanted  the  bourgeois  looks  back, 
her    incessant    gluttony    is    more    vivid    in    his    thoughts 
than  her  charm  :  ; 

She  would  sleep  every  day  till  two  or  three  o'clock  ;  she  had 
her  coffee  and  lunch  in  bed.  At  dinner  she  would  eat  soup,  lobster, 
fish,  meat,  asparagus,  game,  and  after  she  had  gone  to  bed  I  used 
to  bring  up  something,  for  instance,  roast  beef,  and  she  would 
eat  it  with  a  melancholy,  careworn  expression,  and  if  she  waked 
in  the  night  she  would  eat  apples  or  oranges. 

The  story,  it  is  only  fair  to  say,  is  given  in  the  words 
of  a  lover  dissatisfied  with  lust,  and  the  judgment  may 
therefore  be  regarded  as  the  lover's  rather  than  as 
Tchehov's.  Tchehov  sets  down  the  judgment,  however, 
in  a  mood  of  acute  perceptiveness  of  everything  that  is 
jarring  and  vulgar   in  sexual   vanity.      Ariadne's   desire 


174  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

to  please  is  never  permitted  to  please  us  as,  say,  Beatrix 
Esmond's  is.  Her  will  to  fascinate  does  not  fascinate 
when   it   is   refracted   in   Tchehov's   critical   mind  : 

She  waked  up  every  morning  with  the  one  thought  of  "  pleasing." 
It  was  the  aim  and  object  of  her  hfe.  If  I  told  her  that  in  such 
a  house,  in  such  a  street,  there  lived  a  man  who  was  not  attracted 
by  her,  it  would  have  caused  her  real  suffering.  She  wanted  every 
day  to  enchant,  to  captivate,  to  drive  men  crazy.  The  fact  that 
I  was  in  her  power  and  reduced  to  a  complete  nonentity  before 
her  charms  gave  her  the  same  sort  of  satisfaction  that  victors  used 
to  get  in  tournaments.  .  .  .  She  had  an  extraordinary  opinion 
of  her  own  charms  ;  she  imagined  that  if  somewhere,  in  some 
great  assembly,  men  could  have  seen  how  beautifully  she  was 
made  and  the  colour  of  her  skin,  she  would  have  vanquished  all 
Italy,  the  whole  world.  Her  talk  of  her  figure,  of  her  skin,  offended 
me,  and  observing  this,  she  would,  when  she  was  angry,  say  all 
sorts  of  vulgar  things  taunting  me. 

A  few  strokes  of  cruelty  are  added  to  the   portrait  : 

Even  at  a  good-humoured  moment,  she  could  always  insult  a 
servant  or  kill  an  insect  without  a  pang  ;  she  liked  bull-fights, 
liked  to  read  about  murders,  and  was  angry  when  prisoners  were 
acquitted. 

As  one  reads  Ariadne,  one  feels  that  those  who  say 
the  artist  is  not  a  judge  are  in  error.  What  he  must 
avoid  becoming  is  a  prosecuting — perhaps  even  a  defend- 
ing— counsel. 

Egoism  seems  to  be  the  quality  which  offends  Tchehov 
most.  He  is  no  more  in  love  with  it  when  it  masquerades 
as  virtue  than  when  it  parades  as  vice.  An  Artist's 
Story — a  beautiful  sad  story,  which  might  almost  have 
been  written  by  Turgenev — contains  a  fine  critical  por- 
trait of  a  woman  absorbed  in  the  egoism  of  good  works. 
She  is  always  looking  after  the  poor,  serving  on  com- 
mittees, full  of  enthusiasm  for  nursing  and  education. 
She  lacks  only  that  charity  of  the  heart  which  loves 
human  beings,  not  because  they  are  poor,  but  because 
they  are  human  beings.  She  is  by  nature  a  "  boss." 
She  "  bosses  "  her  mother  and  her  younger  sister,  and 


TCHEHOV :   THE  PERFECT  STORY-TELLER    175 

when  the  artist  falls  in  love  with  the  latter,  the  stronger 
will  of  the  woman  of  high  principles  immediately  separates 
lovers  so  frivolous  that  they  had  never  sat  on  a  com- 
mittee in  their  lives.  When,  the  evening  after  the  artist 
confesses  his  love,  he  waits  for  the  girl  to  come  to 
him  in  the  garden  of  her  house,  he  waits  in  vain. 
He  goes  into  the  house  to  look  for  her,  but  does 
not  find  her.  Then  through  one  of  the  doors  he  over- 
hears  the  voice  of  the  lady  of  the  good  works  : 


"  '  God  .  .  .  sent  ...  a  crow,'  "  she  said  in  a  loud,  emphatic 
voice,  probably  dictating — "  '  God  sent  a  crow  a  piece  of  cheese. 
...  A  crow.  ...  A  piece  of  cheese  .  .  .'  Who's  there  ?  "  she 
called  suddenly,  hearing  my  steps. 

"  It's  I." 

"  Ah  !  Excuse  me,  I  cannot  come  out  to  open  this  minute  ; 
I'm  giving  Dasha  her  lesson." 

"  Is  Ekaterina  Pavlovna  in  the  garden  ?  " 

"  No,  she  went  away  with  my  sister  this  morning  to  our  aunt 
in  the  province  of  Penza.  And  in  the  winter  they  w^ill  probably 
go  abroad,"  she  added  after  a  pause.  "  '  God  sent  .  .  .  the 
crow  ...  a  piece  ...  of  cheese  .  .  .'     Have  you   written   it  ?  " 

I  went  into  the  hall  and  stared  vacantly  at  the  pond  and  the 
village,  and  the  sound  reached  me  of  "  A  piece  of  cheese  .  .  .  God 
sent  the  crow  a  piece  of  cheese." 

And  I  went  back  by  the  way  I  had  come  here  for  the  first  time 
— first  from  the  yard  into  the  garden  past  the  house,  then  into 
the  avenue  of  lime-trees.  ...  At  this  point  I  was  overtaken  by 
a  small  boy  who  gave  me  a  note. 

"  I  told  my  sister  everything  and  she  insisted  on  my  parting 
from  you,"  I  read.  "  I  could  not  wound  her  by  disobeying.  God 
will  give  you  happiness.  Forgive  me.  If  only  you  knew  how 
bitterly  my  mother  and   I   are  crying  !  " 

The  people  who  cannot  wound  others — those  are  the 
people  whose  sharp  pangs  we  feel  in  our  breasts  as 
we  read  the  stories  of  Tchehov.  The  people  who  wound 
— it  is  they  whom  he  paints  (or,  rather,  as  Mr.  Garnett 
suggests,  etches)  with  such  felicitous  and  untiring  irony. 
But,  though  he  often  makes  his  people  beautiful  in 
their  sorrow,  he  more  often  than  not  sets  their  sad 
figures    against    a    common  and   ugly   background.      In 


176  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Anyuta,  the  medical  student  and  his  mistress  live  in 
a  room  disgusting  in  its  squalor  : 

Crumpled  bed-clothes,  pillows  thrown  about,  boots,  clothes,  a 
big  filthy  slop-pail  filled  with  soap-suds  in  which  cigarette-ends 
were  swimming,  and  the  litter  on  the  floor — all  seemed  as  though 
purposely  jumbled  together  in  one  confusion.  .  .  . 

And,  if  the  surroundings  are  no  more  beautiful  than 
those  in  which  a  great  part  of  the  human  race  lives, 
neither  are  the  people  more  beautiful  than  ordinary 
people.  In  The  Trousseau,  the  poor  thin  girl  who  spends 
her  life  making  a  trousseau  for  a  marriage  that  will 
never  take  place  becomes  ridiculous  as  she  flushes  at 
the  entrance  of  a  stranger  into  her  mother's  house  : 

Her  long  nose,  which  was  slightly  pitted  with  small-pox,  turned 
red  first,  and  then  the  flush  passed  up  to  her  eyes  and  her  forehead. 

I  do  not  know  if  a  blush  of  this  sort  is  possible,  bu,t 
the  thought  of   it  is   distressing. 

The  woman  in  The  Darling,  who  marries  more  than 
once  and  simply  cannot  live  without  some  one  to  love 
and  to  be  an  echo  to,  is  "  not  half  bad  "  to  look  at. 
But  she  is  ludicrous  even  when  most  unselfish  and  ador- 
ing— especially  when  she  rubs  with  eau-de-Cologne  her 
little,  thin,  yellow-faced,  coughing  husband  with  "  the 
curls  combed  forward  on  his  forehead,"  and  wraps  him 
in  her  warm  shawls  to  an  accompaniment  of  endear- 
ments. "  '  You're  such  a  sweet  pet  !  '  she  used  to  say 
with  perfect  sincerity,  stroking  his  hair.  '  You're  such  a 
pretty   dear  !  '  "  i  ! 

Thus  sympathy  and  disgust  live  in  a  curious  harmony 
in  Tchehov's  stories.  And,  as  he  seldom  allows  disgust 
entirely  to  drive  out  sympathy  in  himself,  he  seldom 
allows  it  to  do  so  in  his  readers  either.  His  world 
may  be  full  of  unswept  rooms  and  unwashed  men  and 
women,  but  the  presiding  genius  in  it  is  the  genius 
of  gentleness  and  love  and  laughter.  It  is  a  dark  world, 
but   Tchehov    brings    light   into   it.      There   is   no   other 


TCHEHOV  :   THE  PERFECT  STORY-TELLER     177 

author  who  gives  so  hltle  offence  as  he  shows  us  (jifciisive 
things  and  people.  He  is  a  writer  who  desires  above 
all  things  to  see  what  men  and  women  are  really  like- 
to  extenuate  nothing  and  to  set  down  naught  in  malice. 
As  a  result,  he  is  a  pessimist,  but  a  pessimist  who 
is  black  without  being  bitter.  I  know  no  writer  who 
leaves  one  with  the  same  vision  of  men  and  women 
as   lost   sheep.  ' 

We  are  now  apparently  to  have  a  complete  edition 
of  the  tales  of  Tchehov  in  English  from  Mrs.  Garnett. 
It  will  deserve  a  place,  both  for  the  author's  and  the 
translator's  sake,  beside  her  Turgenev  and  Dostoevsky. 
In  lifelikeness  and  graciousness  her  work  as  a  trans- 
lator always  reaches  a  high  level.  Her  latest  volumes 
confirm  one  in  the  opinion  that  Tchehov  is,  for  his 
variety,  abundance,  tenderness  and  knowledge  of  the  heart 
of  the  "  rapacious  and  unclean  animal  "  called  man, 
the  greatest  short -story  writer  who  has  yet  appeared 
on  the  planet. 


12 


XX 
LADY  GREGORY 

It  was  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  who,  in  commenting  on  the 
rowdy  reception  of  the  Irish  players  in  some  American 
theatres,  spoke  of  Lady  Gregory  as  "  the  greatest  living 
Irishwoman."  She  is  certainly  a  remarkable  enough 
writer  to  put  a  generous  critic  a  little  off  his  balance. 
Equal  mistress  in  comedy  and  tragedy,  essayist,  gatherer 
of  the  humours  of  folk-lore,  imaginative  translator  of 
heroic  literature,  venturesome  translator  of  Moli^re,  she 
has  contributed  a  greater  variety  of  grotesque  and 
beautiful  things  to  Anglo-Irish  literature  than  any  of 
her  contemporaries. 

She  owes  her  chief  fame,  perhaps,  to  the  way  in 
which,  along  with  Mr.  G.  A.  Birmingham  and  the 
authors  of  Some  Experiences  of  an  Irish  R.M.,  she 
has  kept  alive  the  tradition  of  Ireland  as  a  country  in 
which  Laughter  has  frequent  occasion  to  hold  both 
his  sides.  She  surpasses  the  others  in  the  quality  of 
her  comedy,  however.  Not  that  she  is  more  comic, 
but  that  she  is  more  comprehensively  true  to  life.  Mr. 
Birmingham  has  given  us  farce  with  a  salt  of  reality  ; 
Miss  Somerville  and  Miss  Ross,  practical  jokers  of 
literature,  turned  to  reality  as  upper-class  patrons  of 
the  comic  ;  but  Lady  Gregory  has  gone  to  reality  as 
to  a  cave  of  treasure.  She  is  one  of  the  discoverers 
of  Ireland.  Her  genius,  like  Synge's,  opened  its  eyes 
one  day  and  saw  spread  below  it  the  immense  sea  of 
Irish  common  speech,  with  its  colour,  its  laughter,  and  its 
music.  It  is  a  sort  of  second  birth  which  many  Irish 
men    and    women    of    the    last    generation    or    so    have 

178 


LADY   GREGORY  179 


experienced.  The  beggar  on  the  road,  the  piper  at 
the  door,  the  old  people  in  the  workhouse,  are  hence- 
forth accepted  as  a  sort  of  aristocracy  in  exile. 

Lady  Gregory  obviously  sought  out  their  company 
as  the  heirs  to  a  great  inheritance— ^n  inheritance  of 
imaginative  and  humorous  speech.  Not  that  she 
plundered  them  of  their  fantastic  tropes  so  greedily 
as  Synge  did.  She  studied  rather  their  common  turn 
of  phrase,  its  heights  and  its  hollows,  its  exquisite 
illogic,  its  passionate  underflow  of  poetry.  Has  she 
not  herself  told  us  how  she  could  not  get  on  with  the 
character  of  Bartley  Fallon  in  Spreading  the  News, 
till  one  day  she  met  a  melancholy  man  by  the  sea  at 
Duras,  who,  after  describing  the  crosses  he  endured 
at  home,  said  :  "  But  I'm  thinking  if  I  went  to  America, 
it's  long  ago  I'd  be  dead.  And  it's  a  great  expense 
for  a  poor  man  to  be  buried  in  America."  Out  of 
sentences  like  these — sentences  seized  upon  with  the 
genius  of  the  note-book — she  has  made  much  of  what 
is  most  delightful  in  her  plays.  Her  sentences  are 
steeped  and  dyed  in  life,  even  when  her  situations  are 
as   mad  as  hatters. 

Some  one  has  said  that  every  great  writer  invents 
a  new  language.  Lady  Gregory,  whom  it  would  be 
unfair  to  praise  as  a  great  writer,  has  at  least  qualified 
as  one  by  inventing  a  new  language  out  of  her 
knowledge  of  Irish  peasant  speech.  This,  perhaps,  is 
her  chief  literary  peril.  Having  discovered  the  beautiful 
dialect  of  the  Kiltartan  peasantry,  she  was  not  content 
to  leave  it  a  peasant  dialect — as  we  find  it  in  her  best 
dramatic  work.  Seven  Short  Plays  ;  but  she  set  about 
transforming  it  into  a  tongue  into  which  all  literature 
and  emotion  might  apparently  be  translated.  Thus,  she 
gave  us  Moliere  in  Kiltartan— a  ridiculously  successful 
piece  of  work — and  she  gave  us  Finn  and  Cuchullain 
in  modified  Kiltartan,  and  this,  too,  was  successful, 
sometimes  very  beautifully  so.  Here,  however,  she  had 
masterpieces    to    begin    with.       In    Irish    Folk-History 


180  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

Plays,  on  the  other  hand,  we  find'  her  embarking,  not 
upon  translation,  but  upon  original  heroic  drama,  in 
the  Kiltartan  language.  The  result  is  unreality  as  unreal 
as  if  Meredith  had  made  a  farm-labourer  talk  like 
Diana  of  the  Crossways.  Take,  for  instance,  the  first 
of  the  plays,  Grania,  which  is  founded  on  the  story  of 
the  pursuit  of  Diarmuid  and  Grania  by  Finn  MacCool, 
to  whom  Grania  had  been  betrothed.  W;hen  Finn, 
disguised  as  a  blind  beggar,  visits  the  lovers  in  their 
tent,  Grania,  who  does  not  recognize  him,  bids  him 
give  Finn  this  message  from  her  : — 

Give  heed  to  what  I  say  now.  If  you  have  one  eye  is  bhnd, 
let  it  be  turned  to  the  place  where  we  are,  and  that  he  might  ask 
news  of.  And  if  you  have  one  seeing  eye,  cast  it  upon  me,  and 
tell  Finn  you  saw  a  woman  no  way  sad  or  afraid,  but  as  airy  and 
high-minded  as  a  mountain-filly  would  be  challenging  the  winds 
of  March  ! 

I  flatly  refuse  to  take  the  high-minded  mountain 
filly  seriously  as  a  tragic  heroine,  and  I  confess  I 
hold  Finn  equally  suspect,  disguised  as  a  beggar  though 
he  is,  when  he  speaks  of  himself  to  Grania  as  a  hard 
man — "  as  hard  as  a  barren  step-mother's  slap,  or  a 
highway  gander's  gob."  After  all,  in  heroic  literature, 
we  must  have  the  illusion  of  the  heroic.  If  we 
can  get  the  peasant  statement  of  the  heroic,  that  is 
excellent  ;  its  sincerity  brings  its  illusion.  But  a  mere 
imitation  of  the  peasant  statement  of  the  heroic,  such 
as  Lady  Gregory  seems  to  aim  at  giving  us  in  these 
sentences,  is  as  pinchbeck  and  unreal  as  Macpherson's 
Ossian.  It  reaches  a  grotesque  absurdity  when  at  the 
close  of  Act  II  Finn  comes  back  to  the  door  of  the 
tent  and,  in  order  to  stir  up  Diarmuid's  jealousy;, 
says  : — 

It  is  what  they  were  saying  a  while  ago,  the  King  of  Foreign 
is  grunting  and  sighing,  grunting  and  sigliing,  around  and  about 
the  big  red  sally  tree  beside  the  stream  ! 

.To  write  like  that  is  to  use  not  a  style  but  a  jargon. 


LADY  GREGORY  isi 


If  you  want  a  standard  of  reality  with  which  to 
compare  these  passages  of  Abbey-Theatre  rhetoric,  you 
have  only  to  turn  to  Lady  Gregory's  own  notes  at 
the  end  of  /risk  Folk-History  Plays,  where  she  records 
a  number  of  peasant  utterances  on  Irish  history.  Here, 
and  not  in  the  plays — in  the  tragic  plays,  at  any  rate — 
is  the  real  "  folk-history  "  of  her  book  to  be  found. 
One  may  take,  as  an  example,  the  note  on  Kincora, 
w^here  some  one  tells  of  the  Battle  of  Clontarf,  in 
which  Brian  Boru  defeated  the  Danes  : — 

Clontarf  was  on  the  head  of  a  game  of  chess.  The  generals  of 
th@  Danes  were  beaten  at  it,  and  they  were  vexed.  It  was  Broder, 
that  the  Brodericks  are  descended  from,  that  put  a  dagger  through 
Brian's  heart,  and  he  attending  to  his  prayers.  What  the  Danes 
left  in  Ireland  were  hens  and  weasels.  And  when  the  cock  crows 
in  the  morning  the  country  people  will  always  say  :  "It  is  for 
Denmark  they  are  crowing ;  crowing  they  are  to  be  back  in 
Denmark." 

Lady  Gregory  reveals  more  of  life — leaping,  imag- 
inative life — in  that  little  note  than  in  all  the  three 
acts  about  Grania  and  the  three  about  Brian.  It  is 
because  the  characters  in  the  comic  plays  in  the  book 
are  nearer  the  peasantry  in  stature  and  in  outlook 
that  she  is  so  much  more  successful  with  them  than 
with  the  heroes  and  heroines  of  the  tragedies.  She 
describes  the  former  plays  as  "  tragic  comedies  "  ;  but 
in  the  first  and  best  of  them,  The  Canavans,  it  is  difficult 
to  see  where  the  tragedy  comes  in.  The  Canavans  is 
really  a  farce  of  the  days  of  Elizabeth.  The  principal 
character  is  a  cowardly  miller,  who  ensues  nothing  but 
his  own  safety  in  the  war  of  loyalties  and  disloyalties 
which  is  destroying  Ireland.  He  is  equally  afraid  of 
the  wrath  of  the  neighbours  on  the  one  hand,  and  the 
wrath  of  the  Government  on  the  other.  Consequently, 
he  is  at  his  mts'  end  when  his  brother  Antony  comes 
seeking  shelter  in  his  house,  after  deserting  from  the 
English  Army.  When  the  soldiers  come  looking  for 
Antony,   so  helpless  with  terror   is   the  miller,   that  he 


182  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

flies  into  hiding  among  his  sacks,  and  his  brother  has 
to  impersonate  him  in  the  interview  with  the  officer 
who  carries  out  the  search.  The  situation  obviously 
lends  itself  to  comic  elaborations,  and  Lady  Gregory 
misses  none  of  her  opportunities.  She  flies  off  from 
every  semblance  of  reality  at  a  tangent,  however,  in  a 
later  scene,  where  Antony  disguises  himself  as  Queen 
Elizabeth,  supposed  to  have  come  on  a  secret  visit  of 
inspection  to  Ireland,  and  takes  in  both  his  brother 
and  the  officer  (who  is  himself  a  Canavan,  anglicized 
under  the  name  of  Headley).  This  is  a  sheer  invention 
of  the  theatre  ;  it  turns  the  play  from  living  speech 
into  machinery.  The  Canavans,  however,  has  enough  of 
present-day  reality  to  make  us  forgive  its  occasional 
stage-Elizabethanism.  On  the  whole,  its  humours  gain 
nothing    from    their    historical    setting. 

The  White  Cockade,  the  second'  of  the  tragic 
comedies,  is  a  play  about  the  flight  of  King  James  II 
after  the  Battle  of  the  Boyne,  and  it,  too,  is  lifeless 
and  mechanical  in  so  far  as  it  is  historical.  King 
James  himself  is  a  good  comic  figure  of  a  conventional 
sort,  as  he  is  discovered  hiding  in  the  barrel  ;  but 
Sarsfield,  who  is  meant  to  be  heroic,  is  all  joints  and 
sawdust  ;  and  the  mad  Jacobite  lady  is  a  puppet  who 
might  have  been  invented  by  any  writer  of  plays. 
"  When  my  White  Cockade  was  produced,"  Lady, 
Gregory  tells  us,  "I  was  pleased  to  hear  that  Mr. 
Synge  had  said  my  method  had  made  the  writing  of 
historical  drama"  again  possible."  But  surely,  granted 
the  possession  of  the  dramatic  gift,  the  historical  imag- 
ination is  the  only  thing  that  makes  the  writing  of 
historical  drama  possible.  Lady  Gregory  does  not  seem 
to  me  to  possess  the  historical  imagination.  Not  that 
I  believe  in  archaeology  in  the  theatre  ;  but,  apart  from 
her  peasant  characters,  she  cannot  give  us  the  illusion 
of  reality  about  the  figures  in  these  historical  plays. 
If  we  want  the  illusion  of  reality,  we  shall  have  to  turn 
from  The  White  Cockade  to  the  impossible  scene  outside 


LADY  GREGORY  183 

the  post-office  and  the  butcher's  shop  in  tfyaciiiili 
Halvey.  As  for  the  third  of  the  tragic  comedies, 
The  Deliverer,  it  is  a  most  interesting  curiosity.  In  it 
we  have  an  allegory  of  the  fate  of  Parnell  in  a  setting 
of  the  Egypt  of  the  time  of  Moses.  Moses  himself — 
or  the  King's  nursling,  as  he  is  called — is  Parnell  ;  and 
he  and  the  other  characters  talk  Kiltartan  as  to  the 
manner  born.  The  Deliverer  is  grotesque  and,  in  its 
way,  impressive,  though  the  conclusion,  in  which  the 
King's  nursling  is  thrown  to  the  King's  cats  by  his 
rebellious  followers,  invites  parody.  The  second  volume 
of  the  Irish  Folk-History  Plays,  even  if  it  reveals  only 
Lady  Gregory's  talent  rather  than  her  genius,  is  full 
of  odd  and  entertaining  things,  and  the  notes  at  the 
end  of  both  of  these  volumes,  short  though  they  are,  do 
give  us  the  franchise  of  a  wonderful  world  of  folk- 
history. 


XXI 
MR.    CUNNINGHAME   GRAHAM 

Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham  is  a  grandee  of  contem- 
porary literature.  He  is  also  a  grandee  of  revolutionary- 
politics.  Both  in  literature  and  in  politics  he  is  a  figure 
of  challenge  for  the  love  of  challenge  more  than  any- 
other  man  now  writing.  Other  men  challenge  us  with 
Utopias,  with  moral  laws  and  so  forth.  But  Mr.  Graham 
has  little  of  the  prophet  or  the  moralist  about  him. 
He  expresses  himself  better  in  terms  of  his  hostilities 
than  in  terms  of  visionary  cities  and  moralities  such 
as  Plato  and  Shelley  and  Mazzini  have  built  for  us  out 
of  light  and  fire.  It  is  a  temperament,  indeed,  not  a 
vision  or  a  logic,  that  Mr.  Graham  has  brought  to 
literature.  He  blows  his  fantastic  trumpet  outside  the 
walls  of  a  score  of  Jerichog — Jerichos  of  empire, 
of  cruelty,  of  self-righteousness,  of  standardized  civiliza- 
tion— and  he  seems  to  do  so  for  the  sheer  soldierly 
joy  of  the  thing.  One  feels  that  if  all  the  walls  of 
all  the  Jerichos  were  suddenly  to  collapse  before  his 
trumpet-call  he  would  be  the  loneliest  man  alive.  For 
he  is  one  of  those  for  whom,  above  all,  "  the  fight's 
the  thing." 

It  would  be  difl^cult  to  find  any  single  purpose  running 
through  the  sketches  which  fill  most  of  his  books. 
His  characteristic  book  is  a  medley  of  cosmopolitan 
"  things  seen  "  and  comments  grouped  together  under 
a  title  in  which  irony  lurks.  Take  the  volume  called 
Chanty,  for  example.  Both  the  title  of  the  book  and 
the  subject-matter  of  several  of  the  sketches  may  be 
regarded    as   a   challenge   to   the   unco*   guid    (if   there 

184 


31R.   CUNNINGHAME  GRAHAM  185 


are  any  left)  and  to  respectability  (from  which  even 
the  humblest  are  no  longer  safe).  On  the  other  hand, 
his  title  may  be  the  merest  lucky-bag  accident.  It 
seems  likely  enough,  however,  that  in  choosing  it  the 
author  had  in  mind  the  fact  that  tJie  supreme  word 
of  charitableness  in  the  history  of  man  was  spoken 
concerning  a  woman  who  was  taken  in  adultery.  It  is 
scarcely  an  accident  that  in  Charity  a  number  of  the 
chapters  relate  to  women  who  make  a  profession  of 
sin.  , 

Mr.  Graham  is  unique  in  his  treatment  of  these 
members  of  the  human  family.  If  he  docs  not  throw 
stones  at  them,  as  the  Pharisees  of  virtue  did,  neither 
does  he  glorify  them  as  the  Pharisees  of  vice  have 
done  in  a  later  generation.  He  simply  accepts  them 
as  he  would  accept  a  broken-down  nation  or  a  wounded 
animal,  and  presents  them  as  characters  in  the  human 
drama.  It  would  be  more  accurate  to  say  *'  as  figures 
in  the  human  picture,"  for  he  is  far  more  of  a  painter 
than  a  dramatist.  But  the  point  to  be  emphasized  is 
that  these  stories  are  records,  tragic,  grim  or  humorous, 
as  the  portraits  in  Chaucer  are — acceptances  of  life  as  it 
is — at  least,  of  life  as  it  is  outside  the  vision  of  policemen 
and  other  pillars  of  established  interests.  For  Mr. 
Graham  can  forgijVe  you  for  anything  but  two  things — 
being  successful  (in  the  vulgar  sense  of  the  term)  or 
being  a  policeman. 

It  would  be  wrong,  however,  to  suggest  that  Mr. 
Graham  achieves  the  very  finest  things  in  charity.  It 
is  the  charity  of  tolerance,  or  the  minor  charity,  that 
is  most  frequent  in  his  pages.  The  larger  charity 
which  we  find  in  Tolstoi  and  the  great  teachers  is 
not  here.  vWe  could  not  imagine  Mr.  Graham  forgetting 
himself  so  far  in  his  human  sympathies  as  Ruskin  did 
when  he  stooped  and  kissed  the  filthy  beggar  outside 
the  church  door  in  Rome.  Nor  do  we  find  in  any 
of  these  sketches  of  outcasts  that  sense  of  humanity 
bruised    and   exiled   that   we   get    in   such   a   story   as 


186  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 


Maupassant's  Boule  de  Suif.  Mr.  Graham  gloriously 
insists  upon  our  recognizing  our  human  relations,  but 
many  of  them  he  introduces  to  us  as  first  cousins 
once  removed  rather  than  as  brothers  and  sisters  by 
the  grace  of  God. 

He  does  more  than  this  in  his  preface,  indeed,  a 
marvellous  piece  of  reality  and  irony  which  tells  how 
a  courtesan  in  Gibraltar  fell  madly  in  love  with  a 
gentleman-sponger  who  lived  on  her  money  while  he 
could,  and  then  took  the  first  boat  home  with  discreet 
heartlessness  on  coming  into  a  bequest  from  a  far-off 
cousin.  "  Good  God,  a  pretty  sight  I  should  have 
looked  .  .  ."  he  explained  to  a  kindred  spirit  as  they 
paced  the  deck  of  the  boat  to  get  an  appetite.  "  I 
like  her  well  enough,  but  what  I  say  is.  Charity  begins 
at  home,  my  boy.  Ah,  there's  the  dinner  bell  !  "  Mr. 
Graham  has  a  noble  courtesy^,  an  unerring  chivalry 
that  makes  him  range  himself  on  the  side  of  the  bottom 
dog,  a  detestation  of  anything  like  bullying — every  gift 
of  charity,  indeed,  except  the  shy  genius  of  pity.  For 
lack  of  this  last,  some  of  his  sketches,  such  as  Un 
Autre   'Monsieur,   are   mere   anecdotes   and   decorations. 

Possibly,  it  is  as  a  romantic  decorator  that  Mr. 
Graham,  in  his  art  as  opposed  to  his  politics,  would 
prefer  to  be  judged.  He  has  dredged  half  the  world 
for  his  themes  and  colours,  and  Spain  and  Paraguay 
and  Morocco  and  Scotland  and  London's  tangled  streets 
all  provide  settings  for  his  romantic  rearrangements 
of  life  in  this  book.  He  has  a  taste  for  uncivil 
scenes,  as  Henley  had  a  taste  for  uncivil  words. 
Even  a  London  street  becomes  a  scene  of  this  kind 
as  he  pictures  it  in  his  imagination  with  huge  motor- 
buses,  like  demons  of  violence,  smashing  their  way 
through  the  traffic.  Or  he  takes  us  to  some  South 
American  forest,  where  the  vampire  bats  suck  the  blood 
of  horses  during  the  night.  0,r  he  introduces  us  to  a 
Spanish  hidalgo,  "  tall,  wry-necked,  and  awkwardly  built, 
with   a  nose  like   a   lamprey   and   feet   hke  coi'acles,'* 


MR.   CUNNINGHAME  GRAHAM  187 

(For  there  is  the  same  note  of  violence,  of  exaggeration, 
in  his  treatment  of  persons  as  of  places.)  Even  in 
Scotland,  he  takes  us  by  preference  to  some  lost  mansion 
standing  in  grotesque  contrast  to  the  "  great  drabncss 
of  prosperity  which  overspreads  the  world."  He  is  a 
great  scene-painter  of  wildernesses  and  lawless  places, 
indeed.  He  is  a  Bohemian,  a  lover  of  adventures  in 
wild  and  sunny  lands,  and  even  the  men  and  women 
are  apt  to  become  features  in  the  strange  scenery  of 
his  pilgrimages  rather  than  dominating  portraits.  In 
his  descriptions  he  uses  a  splendid  rhetoric  such  as  no 
other  living  writer  of  English  commands.  He  has 
revived  rhetoric  as  a  literary  instrument.  Aubrey 
Beardsley  called  Turner  a  rhetorician  in  paint.  If  we 
were  to  speak  of  Mr.  Graham  as  a  painter  in  rhetoric, 
we  should  be  doing  more  than  making  a  phrase. 

But  Mr.  Graham  cannot  be  summed  up  in  a  phrase. 
To  meet  him  in  his  books  is  one  of  the  desirable 
experiences  of  contemporary  literature,  as  to  hear  him 
speak  is  one  of  the  desirable  experiences  of  modern 
politics.  Protest,  daring,  chivalry,  the  passion  for  the 
colour  of  life  and  the  colour  of  words — he  is  the 
impersonation  of  these  things  in  a  world  that  is 
muddling  its  way  half-heartedly  towards  the  Promised 
Land. 


XXII 
SWINBURNE 

1.  The  Exotic  Bird 

Swinburne  was  an  absurd  character.  He  was  a  ;bird 
of  showy  strut  and  plumage.  One  could  not  but  admire 
his  glorious  feathers  ;  but,  as  soon  as  he  began  to 
moult — and  he  had  already  moulted  excessively  by  the 
time  Watts -Dunton  took  him  under  his  roof — one  saw 
how  very  little  body  there  was  underneath.  Mr.  Gosse 
in  his  biography  compared  Swinburne  to  a  coloured  and 
exotic  bird — a  "  scarlet  and  azure  macaw,"  to  be  precise 
— and  the  comparison  remains  in  one's  imagination. 
Watts-Dunton,  finding  the  poor  creature  moulted  and 
"  off  its  feed,"  carried  it  down  to  Putney,  resolved  to 
domesticate  it.  He  watched  over  it  as  a  farmer's  wife 
watches  over  a  sick  hen.  He  taught  it  to  eat  out  of 
his  hand.  He  taught  it  to  speak— to  repeat  things  after 
him,  even  "  God  Save  the  Queen."  Some  people 
say  that  he  ruined  the  bird  by  these  methods.  Others 
maintain  that,  on  the  contrary,  but  for  him  the  bird 
would  have  died  of  a  disease  akin  to  the  staggers. 
They  say,  moreover,  that  the  tameness  and  docility  of 
the  bird,  while  he  was  looking  after  it,  have  been 
greatly  exaggerated,  and  they  deny  that  it  was  entirely 
bald  of  its  old  gay  feathers. 

There  you  have  a  brief  statement  of  the  great  Swin- 
burne question,  which,  it  seems  likely,  will  last  as  long 
as  the  name  of  Swinburne  is  remembered.  It  is  not 
a  question  of  any  importance  ;  but  that  will  not  prevent 
us  from  arguing  it  hotly.  The  world  takes  a  malicious 
joy  in  jibing  at  men  of  genius  and  their  associates,  and 

18S 


SWINBURNE  189 


a  generous  joy  in  defending  them  from  jibes.  Further, 
the  discussion  that  interests  the  greatest  number  of 
people  is  discussion  that  has  come  down  to  a  personal 
level.  Ten  people  will  be  bored  by  an  argument  as  to 
the  nature  of  Swinburne's  genius  for  one  who  will  be 
bored  by  an  argument  as  to  the  nature  of  Swinburne's 
submissiveness  to  Watts-Dunton.  .Was  Watts-Dunton, 
in  a  phrase  deprecated  by  the  editors  of  a  recent  book 
of  letters,  a  "kind  of  amiable  Svengali"?  Did  he 
allow  Swinburne  to  have  a  will  of  his  own?  Did  Swin- 
burne, in  going  to  Putney,  go  to  the  Devil?  Or  did 
not  Watts-Dunton  rather  play  the  part  of  the  good 
Samaritan?  Unfortunately,  all  those  who  have  hitherto 
attempted  to  describe  the  relations  of  the  two  men  have 
succeeded  only  in  making  them  both  appear  ridiculous. 
Mr.  Gosse,  a  man  of  letters  with  a  sting,  has  done  it 
cleverly.  The  others,  like  the  editors  to  whom  I  have 
referred,  have  done  it  inadvertently.  They  write  too 
solemnly.  If  Swinburne  had  lost  a  trouser-button,  they 
would  not  have  felt  it  inappropriate,  one  feels,  for  the 
Archbishop  of  Canterbury  to  hurry  to  the  scene  and 
go  down  on  his  knees  on  the  floor  to  look  for  it.  .  .  . 
iWell,  no  doubt,  Swinburne  was  an  absurd  character. 
And  so  was  Watts-Dunton.  And  so,  perhaps,  is  the 
Archbishop  of  Canterbury. 

Most  of  us  have,  at  one  time  or  another,  fallen  under 
the  spell  of  Swinburne  owing  to  the  genius  with  which 
he  turned  into  music  the  enthusiasm  of  the  heretic. 
He  fluttered  through  the  sooty  and  Sabbatic  air  of  the 
Victorian  era,  uttering  melodious  cries  of  protest  against 
everything  in  morals,  pohtics,  and  religion  for  which 
Queen  Victoria  seemed  to  stand.  He  was  like  a  rebel- 
lious boy  who  takes  more  pleasure  in  breaking  the 
Sabbath  than  in  the  voice  of  nightingales.  He  was  one 
of  the  few  Englishmen  of  genius  who  have  understood 
the  French  zest  for  shocking  the  bourgeois.  He  had 
little  of  his  own  to  express,  but  he  discovered  the  heretic's 
gospel   in    Gautier   and    Baudelaire   and   set   it   forth   in 


190  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

English  in  music  that  he  might  have  learned  from  the 
Sirens  who  sang  to  Ulysses.  He  revelled  in  blas- 
phemous and  licentious  fancies  that  would  have  made 
Byron's  hair  stand  on  end.  Nowadays,  much  of  the 
blasphemy  and  licentiousness  seems  flat  and  unprofit- 
able as  Government  beer.  But  in  those  days  it  seemed 
heady  as  wine  and  beautiful  as  a  mediaeval  tale.  There 
was  always  in  Swinburne  more  of  pose  than  of  passion. 
That  is  why  we  have  to  some  extent  grown  tired  of 
him.  But  in  the  atmosphere  of  Victorianism  his  pose 
v.'as  original  and  astonishing.  He  was  anti-Christ  in  a 
world  that  had  annexed  Christ  rather  than  served  him. 
Nowadays,  there  is  such  an  abundance  of  anti-Christs 
that  the  part  seems  hardly  worth  playing  by  a  man  of 
first-rate  ability.  Consequently,  we  have  to  remember 
the  circumstances  in  which  they  were  written  in  order 
to  appreciate  to  the  full  many  of  Swinburne's  poems 
and  even  some  of  the  amusing  outbursts  of  heresy  in 
his  letters.  Still,  even  to-day,  one  cannot  but  enjoy 
the  gusto  with  which  he  praised  Trelawney — Shelley's 
and  Byron's  Trelawney — "  the  most  splendid  old  man 
I  have  seen  since  Landor  and  my  own  grandfather  ":  — 

Of  the  excellence  of  his  principles  I  will  say  but  this  :  that  I 
did  think,  by  the  grace  of  Saban  (unto  whom,  and  not  unto  me, 
be  the  glory  and  thanksgiving.  Amen  :  Selah),  I  was  a  good 
atheist  and  a  good  republican  ;  but  in  the  company  of  this  magni- 
ficent old  rebel,  a  lifelong  incarnation  of  the  divine  right  of  insur- 
rection, I  felt  myself,  by  comparison,  a  Theist  and  a  Royahst. 

In  another  letter  he  writes  in  the  same  gay,  under- 
graduatish  strain  of  marriage:  — 

When  I  hear  that  a  personal  friend  has  fallen  into  matrimonial 
courses,  I  feel  the  same  sorrow  as  if  I  had  heard  of  his  lapsing  into 
theism — a  holy  sorrow,  unmixed  with  anger  ;  for  who  am  I  to 
judge  him  ?  i  think  at  such  a  sight,  as  the  preacher — was  it  not 
Baxter  ? — at  the  sight  of  a  thief  or  murderer  led  to  the  gallows  : 

•'  There,  but  for  the  grace  of ,  goes  A.  C.  S.,"  and  drop  a  tear 

over  fallen  man. 

There  was,  it  is  only  fair  to  say,  a  great  deal  in  Swin- 


SWINBURNE  191 


burne's  insurrectionism  that  was  noble,  or,  at  least, 
in  tune  with  nobleness.  But  it  is  impossible  to  persuade 
oneself  that  he  was  ever  among  the  genuine  poets  of 
liberty.  He  loved  insurrectionism  for  its  own  sake. 
He  revelled  in  it  in  the  spirit  of  a  rhetorician  rather 
than  of  a  martyr.  He  was  a  glorious  humbug,  a  sort  of 
inverted  Pecksniff.  Even  his  republicanism  cannot  have 
gone  very  deep  if  it  is  true,  as  certain  of  his  editors 
declare,  that  having  been  born  within  the  precincts  of 
Belgravia  "  was  an  event  not  entirely  displeasing  to  a 
man  of  his  aristocratic  leanings."  Swinburne,  it  seems, 
was  easily  pleased.  One  of  his  proudest  boasts  was 
that  he  and  Victor  Hugo  bore  a  close  resemblance  to 
each  other  in  one  respect:  both  of  them  were  almost 
dead  when  they  were  born,  "  certainly  not  expected 
to  live  an  hour."  There  was  also  one  great  difference 
between   them.      Swinburne  never  grew  up. 

His  letters,  some  of  which  Messrs.  Hake  and  Compton 
Rickett  have  given  us,  are  interesting  and  amusing,  but 
they  do  not  increase  one's  opinion  of  Swinburne's  mind. 
He  reveals  himself  as  a  sensitive  critic  in  his  remarks 
on  the  proofs  of  Rossetti's  poems,  in  his  comments  on 
Morris,  and  in  his  references  to  Tennyson's  dramas. 
But,  as  a  rule,  his  intemperance  of  praise  and  blame 
makes  his  judgments  appear  mere  eccentricities  of 
the  blood.  He  could  not  praise  Falstaff,  for  instance, 
without  speaking  of  "  the  ever  dear  and  honoured  pres- 
ence of  Falstaff,"  and  applauding  the  "  sweet,  sound,  ripe 
toothsome,  wholesome  kernel  "  of  Falstaff's  character 
as  well  as  humour.  He  even  defied  the  opinion  of 
his  idol,  Victor  Hugo,  and  contended  that  Falstaff  was 
not  really  a  coward.  All  the  world  will  agree  that 
Swinburne  was  right  in  glorifying  Falstaff.  He  glorified 
him,  however,  on  the  wrong  plane.  He  mixed  his  planes 
in  the  same  way  in  his  paean  over  Captain  Webb's  feat 
in  swimming  the  English  Channel.  "  I  consider  it," 
he  said,  "  as  the  greatest  glory  that  has  befallen 
England  since  the  publication  of  Shelley's  greatest  poem, 


192  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

whatever  that  may  have  been."  This  is  shouting,  not 
speech.  But  then,  as  I  have  said,  Swinburne  never  grew 
up.  He  never  learned  to  speak.  He  was  ever  a  shouter. 
The  question  that  has  so  far  not  been  settled  is  :  Did 
Watts-Dunton  put  his  hand  over  Swinburne's  mouth  and 
forcibly  stop  him  from  shouting?  As  we  know,  he 
certainly  stopped  him  from  swearing  before  ladies,  except 
in  French.  But,  as  for  shouting,  Swinburne  had  already 
exhausted  himself  when  he  went  to  the  Pines.  Mean- 
while, questions  of  this  sort  have  begun  to  absorb  us 
to  such  a  degree  that  we  are  apt  to  forget  that  Swin- 
burne after  all  was  a  man  of  genius — a  man  with  an 
entrancing  gift  of  melody — spiritually  an  echo,  perhaps, 
but  aesthetically  a  discoverer,  a  new  creature,  the  most 
amazing  ecstatician  of  our  time.  , 

2.  Genius  without  Eyes 

Swinburne,  says  Mr.  Gosse,  "  was  not  quite  like  a 
human  being."  That  is  chiefly  what  is  the  matter  with 
his  poetry.  He  did  not  write  quite  like  a  human  being. 
He  wrote  like  a  musical  instrument.  There  are  few 
poets  whose  work  is  less  expressive  of  personal  passions. 
He  was  much  given  to  ecstasies,  but  it  is  remarkable  that 
most  of  these  were  echoes  of  other  people's  ecstasies. 
He  sought  after  rapture  both  in  politics  and  poetry, 
and  he  took  as  his  masters  Mazzini  in  the  one  and  Victor 
Hugo  in  the  other.  He  has  been  described  as  one  who, 
while  conversing,  even  in  his  later  years,  kept  "  bobbing 
all  the  while  like  a  cork  on  the  sea  of  his  enthusiasms." 
And,  in  a  great  deal  of  his  rapture,  there  is  much  of 
the  levity  as  well  as  the  "  bobbing  "  quality  of  the 
cork.  He  who  sang  the  hymns  of  the  Republic  in 
his  youth,  ended  his  life  as  rhetorician-in-chief  of  the 
Jingoes  against  the  Irish  and  the  Boers.  Nor  does 
one  feel  that  there  was  any  philosophic  basis  for  the 
change  in  his  attitude  as  there  was  for  a  similar  change 
in  the  attitude  of  Burke  and  Wordsworth  in  their  later 


SWINBURNE  193 


a 


years.  He  was  influenced  more  by  persons  than  by 
principles.  One  does  not  find  any  real  vision  of 
Republic  in  his  work  as  one  finds  it  in  the  work  of 
Shelley.  He  had  little  of  the  saintliness  of  spirit  which 
marks  the  true  RepubHcan  and  which  turns  poHtics  into 
music  in  The  Masque  of  Anarchy.  His  was  not  one 
of  those  tortured  souls,  like  Francis  Adams's,  which  desire 
the  puUing-down  of  the  pillars  of  the  old,  bad  world 
more  than  love  or  fame.  There  is  no  utterance  of  the 
spirit  in  such  lines  as  : — 

Let  our  flag  run  out  straight  in  the  wind  ! 

The  old  red  shall  be  floated  again 
When  the  ranks  that  are  thin  shall  be  thinned. 

When  the  names  that  are  twenty  are  ten  ; 

When  the  devil's  riddle  is  mastered 

And  the  galley-bench  creaks  with  a  Pope, 

We  shall  see  Buonaparte  the  bastard 
Kick  heels  with  his  throat  in  a  rope. 

It  is  possible  for  those  who  agree  with  the  sentiments 
to  deriv^e  a  certain  satisfaction  from  verse  of  this  sort 
as  from  a  vehement  leading  article.  But  there  is  nothing 
here  beyond  the  rhetoric  of  the  hot  fit.  There  is 
nothing  to  call  back  the  hot  fit  in  anybody  older  than  a 
boy. 

Even  when  Swinburne  was  writing  out  of  his  personal 
experience,  he  contrived  somehow  to  empty  his  verse 
of  personality  and  to  put  sentimentalism  and  rhetoric 
in  its  place.  We  have  an  instance  of  this  in  the  story 
of  the  love-affair  recorded  by  Mr.  Gosse.  Swinburne, 
at  the  age  of  twenty-five,  fell  in  love  with  a  kinswoman 
of  Sir  John  Simon,  the  pathologist.  "  She  gave  him 
roses,  she  played  and  sang  to  him,  and  he  conceived 
from  her  gracious  ways  an  encouragement  which  she 
was  far  from  seriously  intending."  Swinburne  proposed 
to  her,  and,  possibly  from  nervousness,  she  burst  out 
laughing.  He  was  only  human  in  feeling  bitterly 
offended,    and    "  they    parted   on    the    worst    of  terms." 

18 


194  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 

He  went  off  to  Northumberland  to  escape  from  his 
wretchedness,  and  there  he  wrote  The  Triumph  of  Time, 
which  Mr.  Gosse  maintains  is  "  the  most  profound  and 
the  most  touching  of  all  his  personal  poems."  He  assured 
Mr.  Gosse,  fourteen  years  afterwards,  that  "  the  stanzas 
of  this  wonderful  lyric  represented  with  the  exactest 
fidelity  the  emotions  which  passed  through  his  mind 
when  his  anger  had  died  down,  and  when  nothing  re- 
mained but  the  infinite  pity  and  the  pain."  Beautiful 
though  the  poem  intermittently  is,  however,  it  seems  to 
me  to  lack  that  radiance  of  personal  emotion  which  we 
find  in  the  great  love  poems.  There  is  much  decoration 
of  music  of  a  kind  of  which  Swinburne  and  Poe  alone 
possessed  the  secret,  as  in  the  verse  beginning  : — 

There  lived  in  France  a  singer  of  old 
By  the  tideless,  dolorous,  midland  sea. 

In  a  land  of  sand  and  ruin  and  gold 

There  shone  one  woman  and  none  but  she. 

But  is  there  more  than  the  decoration  of  music  in  the 
verses  which  express  the  poet's  last  farewell  to  his 
passion? 

I  shall  go  my  ways,  tread  out  my  measure. 

Fill  the  days  of  my  daily  breath 
With  fugitive  things  not  good  to  treasure. 

Do  as  the  world  doth,  say  as  it  saith  ; 
But  if  we  had  loved  each  other — O  sweet, 
Had  you  felt,  lying  under  the  palms  of  3'our  feet. 
The  heart  of  my  heart,  beating  harder  with  pleasure. 

To  feel  you  tread  it  to  dust  and  death 

Ah,  had  I  not  taken  my  life  up  and  given 

All  that  life  gives  and  the  years  let  go, 
The  wine  and  honey,  the  balm  and  lea\'en. 

The  dreams  reared  high  and  the  hopes  brought  low  ? 
Come  life,  come  death,  not  a  word  be  said  : 
Should  I  lose  you  living,  and  vex  you  dead  ? 
I  shall  never  tell  you  on  earth,  and  in  heaven. 

If  I  cry  to  you  then,  will  you  care  to  know  ? 


SWINBURNE  195 


Browning,  unquestionably,  could  have  expressed  Swin- 
burne's passion  better  than  Swinburne  did  it  himself.  He 
would  not  have  been  content  with  a  se(|uenro  of  vap;uc 
phrases  that  made  music.  With  him  each  phrase  would 
have  been  dramatic  and  charged  with  a  personal  image 
or   a   personal   memory. 

Swinburne,  however,  was  a  great  musician  in  verse 
and  beyond  belittlement  in  this  regard.  It  would  be 
incongruous  to  attempt  a  close  comparison  between  him 
and  Longfellow,  but  he  was  like  Longfellow  in  having 
a  sense  of  music  out  of  all  proportion  to  the  imaginative 
content  of  his  verse.  There  was  never  a  distinguished 
poet  whose  work  endures  logical  analysis  so  badly.  Mr. 
Arthur  Symons,  in  a  recent  essay,  refers  scornfully  to 
those  who  say  that  "  the  dazzling  brilliance  of  Swin- 
burne's form  is  apt  to  disguise  a  certain  thinness  or 
poverty  of  substance."  But  he  produces  no  evidence 
on  the  other  side.  He  merely  calls  on  us  to  observe 
the  way  in  which  Swinburne  scatters  phrases  and  epithets 
of  "  imaginative  subtlety  "  by  the  way,  while  most  poets 
"  present  us  with  their  best  effects  deliberately."  It 
seems  to  me,  on  the  contrary,  that  Swinburne's  phrasing 
is  far  from  subtle.  ,He  induces  moods  of  excitement 
and  sadness  by  his  musical  scheme  rather  than  by  in- 
dividual phrases.  Who  can  resist,  for  example,  the  spell 
of  the  opening  verses  of  Before  ttie  Mirror,  the  poem 
of  enchantment  addressed  to  Whistler's  Little  White  Girl'? 
One  hesitates  to  quote  again  lines  so  well  known. 
But  it  is  as  good  an  example  as  one  can  find  of  the 
pleasure-giving  qualities  of  Swinburne's  music,  apart  from 
his   phrases  and  images  :— 

White  rose  in  red  rose-garden 

Is  not  so  white  ; 
Snowdrops  that  plead  for  pardon 

And  pine  from  fright, 
Because  the  hard  East  blows 
Over  their  maiden  rows. 

Grow  not  as  thy  face  grows  from  pale  to  bright. 


196  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 


Behind  the  veil,  forbidden, 

Shut  up  from  sight, 
Love,  is  there  sorrow  hidden. 

Is  there  dehght  ? 
Is  joy  thy  dower  or  grief, 
Wliite  rose  of  weary  leaf. 

Late  rose  whose  life  is  brief,  whose  loves  are  light  ? 

The  snowdrop  image  in  the  first  verse  is,  charming  as  is 
the  sound  of  the  hnes,  nonsense.  The  picture  of  the 
snowdrops  pleading  for  pardon  and  pining  from  fright 
would  have  been  impossible  to  a  poet  with  the  realizing 
genius  of  the  great  writers.  Swinburne's  sense  of  rhythm, 
however,  was  divorced  in  large  measure  from  his  sense 
of  reality.  He  was  a  poet  without  the  poet's  gift  of 
sight.  William  Morris  complained  that  Swinburne's 
poems  did  not  make  pictures.  Swinburne  had  not  the 
necessary  sense  of  the  lovely  form  of  the  things  around 
him.  His  attitude  to  Nature  was  lacking,  as  Mr.  Gosse 
suggests,  in  that  realism  which  gives  coherence  to  poetry. 
To  quote  Mr.   Gosse's  own  words  : — 

Swinburne  did  not  live,  like  Wordsworth,  in  a  perpetual  com- 
munion with  Nature,  but  exceptional,  and  even  rare,  moments 
of  concentrated  observation  wakened  in  him  an  ecstasy  which 
he  was  careful  to  brood  upon,  to  revive,  and  perhaps,  at  last,  to 
exaggerate.  As  a  rule,  he  saw  little  of  the  world  around  him, 
but  what  he  did  see  was  presented  to  him  in  a  blaze  of  limehght. 

Nearly  all  his  poems  are  a  little  too  long,  a  little  tedious, 
for  the  simple  reason  that  the  muzziness  of  vision  in 
them,  limelight  and  all,  is  bewildering  to  the  intelligence. 
There  are  few  of  his  poems  which  close  in  splendour 
equal  to  the  splendour  of  their  opening  verses.  The 
Garden  of  Proserpine  is  one  of  the  few  that  keep  the 
good  wine  for  the  last.  Here,  however,  as  in  the  rest 
of  his  poems,  we  find  beautiful  passages  rather  than 
beauty  informing  the  whole  poem.  Swinburne's  poems 
have  no  spinal  cord.  One  feels  this  even  in  that  most 
beautiful  of   his   lyrics,   the   first   chorus   in   Aialanta   in 


SWINBURNE  197 


Calydon.  But  how  many  poets  are  there  who  *(julil 
have  sustained  for  long  the  miracle  of  "  When  the  hounds 
of  spring  are  on  winter  traces,"  and  tlie  mtsc  that 
follows?  Mrs.  Disney  Leilh  tells  us  in  a  (  iiarniing 
book  of  recollections  and  letters  that  iIh-  first  time  Swin- 
burne recited  this  poem  to  her  was  on  horseback,  and 
one  wonders  whether  he  had  the  ecstasy  (jf  the  gallop 
and  the  music  of  racing  horses  in  his  blood  when  he 
wrote  the  poem.  His  poems  are  essentially  expressions 
of  ecstasy.  His  capacity  for  ecstasy  was  the  most  genuine 
thing  about  him.  A  thunderstorm  gave  him  "  a  more 
vivid  pleasure  than  music  or  wine."  His  pleasure  in 
thunder,  in  the  gallop  of  horses,  in  the  sea,  was,  how- 
ever, one  fancies,  largely  an  intoxication  of  music.  It 
is  like  one's  own  enjoyment  of  his  poems.  This,  too, 
is  simply  an  intoxication  of  music. 

The  first  series  of  Poems  and  Ballads,  it  must  be 
admitted,  owed  its  success  for  many  years  to  other 
things  besides  the  music.  It  broke  in  upon  the  bourgeois 
moralities  of  nineteenth-century  England  like  a  defiance. 
It  expressed  in  gorgeous  wordiness  the  mood  of  every 
green-sick  youth  of  imagination  who  sees  that  beauty 
is  being  banished  from  the  world  in  the  name  of  goodness. 
One  has  only  to  look  at  the  grey  and  yellow  and  purple 
brick  houses  built  during  the  reign  of  Victoria  to  see 
that  the  green -sick  youth  had  a  good  right  to  protest. 
A  world  that  makes  goodness  the  enemy  of  beauty  and 
freedom  is  a  blasphemous  denial  of  both  goodness  and 
beauty,  and  young  men  will  turn  from  it  in  disgust  to 
the  praise  of  Venus  or  any  other  god  or  goddess  that 
welcomes  beauty  at  the  altar.  The  first  volume  of  Poems 
and  Ballads  was  a  challenge  to  the  lie  of  tall-hatted 
religion.  There  is  much  truth  in  Mr.  Gosse's  saying 
that  "  the  poet  is  not  a  lotus-eater  who  has  never  known 
the  Gospel,  but  an  evangelist  turned  inside  out."  He 
had  been  brought  up  Puritanically  by  his  mother,  who 
kept  all  fiction  from  him  in  his  childiiood,  but  grounded 
him  with  the  happiest  results  m  the  Bible  and  Shake- 


198  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

speare.  "  This  acquaintance  with  the  text  of  the  Bible," 
says  Mr.  Gosse,  "  he  retained  to  the  end  of  his  hfe, 
and  he  was  accustomed  to  be  emphatic  about  the  ad- 
vantage he  had  received  from  the  beauty  of  its  language." 
His  early  poems,  however,  were  not  a  protest  against 
the  atmosphere  of  his  home,  but  against  the  atmosphere 
of  what  can  only  be  described  by  the  worn-out  word 
"  respectability."  Mrs.  Disney  Leith  declares  that  she 
never  met  a  character  more  "  reverent -minded."  And, 
certainly,  the  irreverence  of  his  most  pagan  poems  is 
largely  an  irreverence  of  gesture.  He  delighted  in  shock- 
ing his  contemporaries,  and  planned  shocking  them  still 
further  with  a  volume  called  Lesbia  Brandon,  which 
he  never  published  ;  but  at  heart  he  never  freed  himself 
from  the  Hebrew  awe  in  presence  of  good  and  evil. 
His  Aholibah  is  a  poem  that  is  as  moral  in  one  sense 
as  it  is  lascivious  in  another.  As  Mr.  Gosse  says, 
"  his  imagination  was  always  swinging,  like  a  pendulum, 
between  the  North  and  the  South,  between  Paganism 
and  Puritanism,  between  resignation  to  the  instincts  and 
an  ascetic  repudiation  of  their  authority."  It  is  the 
conflict  between  the  two  moods  that  is  the  most  interest- 
ing feature  in  Swinburne's  verse,  apart  from  its  purely 
artistic  qualities.  Some  writers  find  Swinburne  as  great 
a  magician  as  ever  in  those  poems  in  which  he  is  free 
from  the  obsession  of  the  flesh.  But  I  doubt  if  Swinburne 
ever  rose  to  the  same  great  heights  in  his  later  work  as 
in  the  two  first  series  of  Poems  and  Ballads.  Those 
who  praise  him  as  a  thinker  quote  Hertha  as  a  master- 
piece of  philosophy  in  music,  and  it  was  Swinburne's 
own  favourite  among  his  poems.  But  I  confess  I  find 
it  a  too  long  sermon.  Swinburne's  philosophy  and  re- 
ligion were  as  vague  as  his  vision  of  the  world  about 
him.  "  I  might  call  myself,  if  I  wished,"  he  wrote  in 
1875,  "a  kind  of  Christian  (of  the  Church  of  Blake 
and   Shelley),    but    assuredly    in   no    sense    a   Theist." 

Mr,  Gosse  has  written  Swinburne's  life  with  distinction 
and  understanding  ;    but  it  was  so  eventless  a  life  that 


SWINBUnXR  199 


the  biographer's  is  not  an  easy  task.  The  book  contains 
plenty  of  entertainment,  however.  It  is  amusing  to 
read  of  the  author  of  Anactoria  as  a  child  going  about 
with  Bowdler's  Shakespeare  under  his  arm  and,  in  later 
years,  assisting  Jowett  in  the  preparation  of  a  Child's 
Bible. 


XXIII 
THE   WORK    OF   T.    M.    KETTLE 

To  have  written  books  and  to  have  died  in  battle  has 
been  a  common  enough  fate  in  the  last  few  years. 
But  not  many  of  the  young  men  who  have  fallen  in  the 
war  have  left  us  with  such  a  sense  of  perished  genius 
as  Lieutenant  T.  M.  Kettle,  who  was  killed  at  Ginchy. 
He  was  one  of  those  men  who  have  almost  too  many 
gifts  to  succeed.  .He  had  the  gift  of  letters  and  the 
gift  of  politics  :  he  was  a  mathematician,  an  economist, 
a  barrister,  and  a  philosopher  :  he  was  a  Bohemian  as 
well  as  a  scholar  :  as  one  listened  to  him,  one  suspected 
at  times  that  he  must  be  one  of  the  most  brilliant  con- 
versationalists of  the  age.  He  lived  in  a  blaze  of  adora- 
tion as  a  student,  and,  though  this  adoration  was  tempered 
by  the  abuse  of  opponents  in  his  later  years,  he  still 
had  a  way  of  going  about  as  a  conqueror  with  his  charm. 
Had  he  only  had  a  little  ordinariness  m  his  composition  to 
harden  him,  he  would  almost  certainly  have  ended  as  the 
leading  Irish  statesman  of  his  day.  He  was  undoubtedly 
ambitious  of  success  in  the  grand  style.  But  with  his 
ambition  went  the  mood  of  Ecclesiastes,  which  reminded 
him  of  the  vanity  of  ambition.  In  his  youth  he  adhered 
to  Herbert  Spencer's  much-quoted  saying  :  "  What  I 
need  to  realize  is  how  infinitesimal  is  the  importance  of 
anything  I  can  do,  and  how  infinitely  important  it  is  that 
I  should  do  it."  But,  while  with  Spencer  this  was 
a  call  to  action,  with  Kettle  it  was  rather  a  call  to 
meditation,  to  discussion.  He  was  the  Hamlet  of  modern 
Ireland.     And  it  is  interesting  to  remember  that  in  one 

200 


THE   WORK  OF   T.   M.   KETTLE  201 

of  his  early  essays  he  defended  Hamlet  against  the 
common  charge  of  "  inabihty  to  act,"  and  protested  that 
he  was  the  victim,  not  of  a  vacillating  will,  but  of 
the  fates.  He  contended  that,  so  great  were  the  issues 
and  so  dubious  the  evidence,  Hamlet  had  every  right  to 
hesitate.  "  The  commercial  blandness,"  he  wrote,  "  with 
which  people  talk  of  Hamlet's  '  plain  duty  '  makes  one 
wonder  if  they  recognize  such  a  thing  as  plain  morality. 
The  '  removal  '  of  an  imcle  without  due  process  of  law 
and  on  the  unsupported  evidence  of  an  unsubp(i?nable 
ghost  ;  the  widowing  of  a  mother  and  her  casting-off 
as  unspeakably  vile,  are  treated  as  enterprises  about 
which  a  man  has  no  right  to  hesitate  or  even  to  feel 
unhappy."  This  is  not  mere  speciousncss.  There  is 
the  commonsense   of  pessimism  in  it  too. 

The  normal  Irish  man  of  letters  begins  as  something 
of  a  Utopian.     Kettle  was  always  too  much  of  a  jiessimist 
— he  himself  would  have  said  a   realist — to   yield  easily 
to  romance.     As  a  very  young  man  he  edited  in  Dublin 
a    paper    called    The    Nationist,    for    which    he    claimed, 
above  all  things,  that  it  stood  for  "  reahsm  "  in  poliiiis. 
Some    men   are    driven   into    revolution    by    despair  :     it 
was   as   though   Kettle  had  been  driven   into   reform   by 
despair.      He   admired   the   Utopians,   but   he   could  not 
share  their  faith.      "  If  one  never  got  tired,"  he  wrote 
in   a   sketch   of   the    International   Socialist    Congress  at 
Stuttgart    in     1907,    "one    would    always    be    with    the 
revolutionaries,  the  re-makers,  with  Fourier  and  Kropot- 
kin.       But    the    soul's    energy    is    strictly    limited  ;     and 
with    weariness    there    comes   the    need   for    compromise, 
for  '  machines,'  for  reputation,  for  routine.      Fatigue   is 
the  beginning  of  political  wisdom."     One  finds  the  same 
strain  of  melancholy  transmuting  itself  into  gaiety  with 
an  epigram  in  much  of  his  work.      His  appreciation  of 
Anatole  France  is   the  appreciation  of  a  kindred  spirit. 
In   an  essay   called    The   Fatigue   of   Aimtole  France    in 
The  Day's  Burden  he  defended  his  author's  pessimistic 
attitude  as  he  might  have  defended  his  own  ; 


202  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

A  pessimism,  stabbed  and  gashed  with  the  radiance  of  epigrams, 
as  a  thundercloud  is  stabbed  by  hghtning,  is  a  type  of  spiritual 
Ufe  far  from  contemptible.  A  reasonable  sadness,  chastened  by 
the  music  of  consummate  prose,  is  an  attitude  and  an  achievement 
that  will  help  many  men  to  bear  with  more  resignation  the  burden 
of  our  century. 

How  wonderfully,  again,  he  portrays  the  Hamlet  doubts 
of  Anatole  France,  when,  speaking  of  his  bust,  he  says  : 
"It  is  the  face  of  a  soldier  ready  to  die  for  a  flag  in 
which  he  does  not  entirely  believe."     And  he  goes  on  : 

He  looks  out  at  you  like  a  veteran  of  the  lost  cause  of  intellect, 
to  whose  soul  the  trumpet  of  defeat  strikes  with  as  mournful  and 
vehement  a  music  as  to  that  of  Pascal  himself,  but  who  thinks 
that  a  wise  man  may  be  permitted  to  hearten  himself  up  in  evil 
days  with  an  anecdote  after  the  manner  of  his  master  Rabelais. 

Kettle  himself  practised  just  such  a  gloom  shot  with 
gaiety.  He  did  not,  however,  share  Anatole  France's 
gaiety  of  unbelief.  In  some  ways  he  was  more  nearly 
akin  to  Villiers  de  I'lsle  Adam,  with  his  religion  and  his 
love  of  the  fine  gesture.  Had  he  been  a  Frenchman 
of  an  earlier  generation,  he  would  have  been  famous  for 
his  talk,  like  Villiers,  in  the  cafes.  Most  people  who 
knew  him  contend  that  he  talked  «ven  better  than  he 
wrote  ;  but  one  gets  a  good  enough  example  of  his 
ruling  mood  and  attitude  in  the  fine  essay  called  On 
Saying  Good-bye.  Meditating  on  life  as  **  a  sustained 
good-bye,"   he   writes  : 

Life  is  a  cheap  table  d'hdie  in  a  rather  dirty  restaurant,  with 
Time  changing  the  plates  before  you  have  had  enough  of  anything. 

We  were  bewildered  at  school  to  be  told  that  walking  was  a 
perpetual  falling.  But  life  is,  in  a  far  more  significant  way.  a 
perpetual  dying.  Death  is  not  an  eccentricity,  but  a  settled  habit 
of  the  universe.  The  drums  of  to-day  call  to  us,  as  they  call  to 
young  Fortinbras  in  the  fifth  act  of  Hamlet,  over  corpses  piled 
up  in  such  abundance  as  to  be  almost  ridiculous.  We  praise  the 
pioneer,  but  we  praise  him  on  wrong  grounds.  His  strength  lies 
not  in  his  leaning  out  to  new  things — that  may  be  mere  curiosity 
— but  in  his  power  to  abandon  old  things.  All  his  courage  is  a 
courage  of  adieus, 


THE   WORK   OF   T.   M.   KETTLE  'J03 


'Ihis  meditalivencss  on  the  passin-  iiaiurc  ol  tlmigb  is 
one  of  the  old  moods  of  mankind.  Kettle,  however, 
was  one  of  the  men  of  our  time  in  whom  it  has  achieved 
imaginative  expression.  I  remember  his  once  saying, 
in  regard  to  some  hostile  criticisms  that  had  been  passed 
on  his  own  "  power  to  abandon  old  things  "  :  "  The 
whole  world  is  nothing  but  the  story  of  'a  renegade. 
The  bud  is  renegade  to  the  tree,  and  the  /lower  to  ihf 
bud,  and  the  fruit  to  the  flower."  Though  he  rejoiced 
in  change  as  a  politician,  however,  he  bewailed  the 
necessity  of  change  as  a  philosopher.  His  praise  of 
death  in  the  essay  I  have  just  quoted  from  is  the  praise 
of  something  that  will  put  an  end  to  changes  and  good- 
byes : 

There  is  only  one  journey,  as  it  seems  to  me  ...  in  which  we 
attain  our  ideal  of  going  away  and  going  home  at  the  same  time. 
Death,  normally  encountered,  has  all  the  attractions  of  suicide 
without  anj'  of  its  horrors.     The  old  woman — 

an  old  woman  previously  mentioned  who  complained  that 
"  the  only  bothersome  thing  about  walking  was  that 
the  miles  began  at  the  wrong  end  " — 

the  old  woman  when  she  comes  to  that  road  will  find  the  miles 
beginning  at  the  right  end.  We  shall  all  bid  our  first  real  adieu 
to  those  brother- jesters  of  ours,  Time  and  Space  ;  and  though 
the  handkerchiefs  flutter,  no  lack  of  courage  will  have  power  to 
cheat  or  defeat  us.  "  However  amusing  the  comedy  may  have 
been,"  wrote  Pascal,  "  there  is  always  blood  in  the  fifth  act.  They 
scatter  a  little  dust  in  your  face  ;  and  then  all  is  over  for  ever." 
Blood  there  may  be,  but  blood  does  not  necessarilj'  mean  tragedy. 
The  wisdom  of  humility  bids  us  pray  that  in  that  fifth  act  we  may 
have  good  lines  and  a  timely  exit ;  but,  fine  or  feeble,  there  is 
comfort  in  breaking  the  parting  word  into  its  two  significant 
halves,  a  Dieu.  Since  life  has  been  a  constant  slipping  from  one 
good-bye  to  another,  why  should  we  fear  that  sole  good-bye  which 
promises  to  cancel  all  its  forerunners  ? 

There  you  have  a  passage  which,  in  the  light  of  events, 
seems  strangely  prophetic.  Kettle  certainly  got  his 
"  good  lines  "  at  Ginchy.  He  gave  his  life  greatly  for 
his   ideal  of  a  free   Ireland   in  a  free  Europe. 


204  OLD  AND   NEW   MASTERS 

This  suggests  that  underlying  his  Hamlet  there  was 
a  man  of  action  as  surely  as  there  was  a  jester.  He 
was  a  man  with  a  genius  for  rising  to  the  occasion — 
for  saying  the  fine  word  and  doing  the  fine  thing.  He 
compromised  often,  in  accordance  with  his  "  realistic  " 
view  of  things  ;  but  he  never  compromised  in  his  belief 
in  the  necessity  of  large  and  European  ideals  in  Ireland, 
He  stood  by  alt  good  causes,  not  as  an  extremist,  but 
as  a  helper  somewhat  disillusioned.  But  his  disillusion- 
ment never  made  him  feeble  in  the  middle  of  the  fight. 
He  was  the  sworn  foe  of  the  belittlers  of  Ireland.  One 
will  get  an  idea  of  the  passion  with  which  he  fought  for 
the  traditional  Ireland,  as  well  as  for  the  Ireland  of 
coming  days,  if  one  turns  to  his  rhymed  reply  to  a 
living  English  poet  who  had  urged  the  Irish  to  forget  their 
history  and  gently  cease  to  be  a  nation.  The  last  lines 
of  this  poem — Reason  in  Rhyme,  as  he  calted  it — are 
his  testament  to  England  no  less  than  his  call  to 
Europeanism    is   his   testament  to    Ireland  : 

Bond,  from  the  toil  of  hate  we  may  not  cease  : 

Free,  we  are  free  to  be  your  friend. 

And  when  you  make  your  banquet,  and  we  come. 

Soldier  with  equal  soldier  must  we  sit. 

Closing  a  battle,  not  forgetting  it. 

With  not  a  name  to  hide, 

This  mate  and  mother  of  valiant  "  rebels  "  dead 

Must  come  with  all  her  history  on  her  head. 

We  keep  the  past  for  pride  : 

No  deepest  peace  shall  strike  our  poets  dumb  : 

No  rawest  squad  of  all  Death's  volunteers. 

No  rudest  men  who  died 

To  tear  your  flag  down  in  the  bitter  years. 

But  shall  have  praise,  and  three  times  thrice  again, 

When  at  the  table  men  shall  drink  with  men. 

That  was  Kettle's  mood  to  the  last.  This  was  the  mood 
that  made  him  regard  with  such  horror  the  execution  of 
Pearse  and  Connolly,  and  the  other  leaders  of  the  Dublin 
insurrection.  He  regarded  these  men  as  having  all  but 
destroyed   his   dream   of  an    Ireland   enjoying   the   free- 


THE  WORK  OF  T.   M.   KETTLE  205 

dom.  of  Europe.  But  he  did  not  believe  that  any  Lnglusli 
Government  possessed  the  right  to  be  merciless  in  Ire- 
land. The  murder  of  Sheehy-Skeflington,  who  was  his 
brother-in-law,  cast  another  shadow  over  his  imagination 
from  which  he  never  recovered.  Only  a  week  before  he 
died  he  wrote  to  me  from  France  :  "  The  Skethngton 
case  oppresses  me  with  horror."  When  I  saw  him  in 
the  previous  July,  he  talked  like  a  man  whose  heart 
Easter  Week  and  its  terrible  retributions  had  l)r(jken. 
But  there  must  have  been  exaltation  in  those  days 
just  before  his  death,  as  one  gathers  from  the  last,  or 
all  but  the  last,  of  his  letters  home  : 

We  are  moving  up  to-night  into  the  battle  of  the  Sommc.  The 
bombardment,  destruction,  and  bloodshed  are  beyond  all  imagina- 
tion, nor  did  I  ever  think  that  the  valour  of  simple  men  could  be 
quite  as  beautiful  as  that  of  my  Dublin  Fusiliers.  I  have  had 
two  chances  of  leaving  them — one  on  sick  leave  and  one  to  take 
a  staff  job.     I  have  chosen  to  stay  with  my  comrades. 

There  at  the  end  you  have  the  grand  gesture.  There 
you  have  the  "  good  lines  "  that  Kettle  had  always 
desired. 


XXIV. 
MR.    J.    C.    SQUIRE 

It  would  not  have  been  easy  a  few  years  ago  to  foresee 
the  achievement  of  Mr.  Squire  as  a  poet.  He  laboured 
under  the  disadvantage  of  being  also  a  wit.  It  used 
to  be  said  of  Ibsen  that  a  Pegasus  had  once  been  shot 
under  him,  and  one  was  alarmed  lest  the  reverse  of 
this  was  about  to  happen  to  Mr.  Squire,  and  lest  a 
writer  who  began  in  the  gaiety  of  the  comic  spirit  should 
end  soberly  astride  Pegasus.  When,  in  Tricks  of  the 
Trade,  he  announced  that  he  was  going  to  write  no 
more  parodies,  one  had  a  depressed  feeling  that  he  was 
about  to  give  up  to  poetry  what  was  meant  for  man- 
kind. Yet,  on  reading  Mr.  Squire's  collected  poems 
in  Poems:  First  Scries,  it  is  difficult  not  to  admit  that 
it  was  to  write  serious  verse  even  more  than  parody  and 
political  epigram  that  he  was  born. 

He  has  arranged  the  poems  in  the  book  in  the  order 
of  their  composition,  so  that  we  can  follow  the  develop- 
ment of  his  powers  and  see  him,  as  it  were,  learning 
to  fly.  To  read  him  is  again  and  again  to  be  reminded 
of  Donne.  Like  Donne,  he  is  largely  self-occupied, 
examining  the  horrors  of  his  own  soul,  overburdened 
at  times  with  thought,  an  intellect  at  odds  with  the 
spirit.  Like  Donne,  he  will  have  none  of  the  merely 
poetic,  either  in  music  or  in  imagery.  He  beats  out 
a  music  of  his  own  and  he  beats  out  an  imagery  of  his 
own.  In  his  early  work,  this  sometimes  resulted  in  his 
poems  being  unable  to  rise  far  from  the  ground.  They 
seemed  to  be  labouring  on  unaccustomed  wings  towards 
the   ether.      What   other   living   poet   has  ever  given   a 

au6 


MR.   J.   C.   SQUIRE  207 


poem  such  a  title  as  Antinomies  on  a  /Railway  Station' 
What  other  has  examined  himself  with  the  same  X-rays 
sort  of  realism  as  Mr.  Squire  has  done  in  The  Mind  of 
Man?  The  latter,  like  many  of  Mr.  Squire's  poems,  is 
an  expression  of  fastidious  disgust  with  life.  The  early 
Mr.  Squire  was  a  master  of  disgust,  and  we  see  the  same 
mood  dominant  even  in  the  Ode:  In  a  Restaurant, 
where  the  poet  suddenly  breaks  out :  — 

Soul !  Tliis  life  is  very  strange. 
And  circumstances  very  foul 
Attend  the  belly's  stormy  howl. 

The  ode,  however,  is  not  merely,  or  even  primarily,  an 
expression  of  disgust.  Here,  too,  we  see  Mr.  Squire's 
passion  for  romance  and  energy.  Here,  too,  we  see 
him  as  a  fisherman  of  strange  imagery,  as  when  he 
describes  the  sounds  of  the  restaurant  band  as  they 
float  in  upon  him  from  another  room  and  die  again :  — 

Like  keen-drawn  threads  of  ink  dropped  into  a  glass 
Of  water,  which  curl  and  relax  and  soften  and  pass. 

The  Ode:  In  a  Restaurant  is  perhaps  the  summit 
of  Mr.  Squire's  writing  as  a  poet  at  odds  with  himself, 
a  poet  who  floats  above  the  obscene  and  dull  realities 
of  every  day,  "  like  a  draggled  seagull  over  dreary  flats 
of  mud."  He  has  already  escaped  into  bluer  levels  in 
the  poem.  On  a  Friend  Recently  Dead,  written  in  the 
same  or  the  following  year.  Here  he  ceases  to  be  a  poet 
floating  and  bumping  against  a  ceiling.  He  is  now 
ranging  the  heaven  of  the  emancipated  poets.  Even  when 
he  writes  of  the  common  and  prosaic  things  he  now 
charges  them  with  significance  for  the  emotions.  He 
is  no  longer  a  satirist  and  philosopher,  but  a  lover. 
How  well  he  conjures  up  the  picture  of  the  room  in 
which  his  friend  used  to  sit  and  talk  :— 

Capricious  friend  ! 

Here  in  this  room,  not  long  before  the  end. 

Here  in  this  very  room  six  months  ago 

You  poised  your  foot  and  joked  and  chuckled  so. 


208  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

Beyond  the  window  shook  the  ash-tree  bough. 

You  saw  books,  pictures,  as  I  see  them  now. 

The  sofa  then  was  blue,  the  telephone 

Listened  upon  the  desk  and  softly  shone 

Even  as  now  the  fire-irons  in  the  grate. 

And  the  little  brass  pendulum  swung,  a  seal  of  fate 

Stamping  the  minutes  ;  and  the  curtains  on  window  and  door 

Just  moved  in  the  air  ;    and  on  the  dark  boards  of  the  floor 

These  same  discreetly-coloured  rugs  were  lying  .  .  . 

And  then  you  never  had  a  thought  of  dying. 

How  much  richer,  too,  by  this  time  Mr.  Squire's 
imagery  has  become  !  His  observation  is  both  exact 
and  imaginative  when  he  notes  how — 

the  frail  ash-tree  hisses 
With  a  soft  sharpness  like  a  fall  of  mounded  grain. 

Elsewhere   in  the  same  poem  Mr.   Squire  has  given  us 
a  fine  new  image  of  the  brevity  of  man's  fife  : — 

And  I,  I  see  m^'self  as  one  of  a  heap  of  stones, 
Wetted  a  moment  to  life  as  the  flying  wave  goes  over. 

It  was  not,  however,  till  The  Lily  of  Malud  appeared 
that  readers  of  poetry  in  general  realized  that  Mr.  Squire 
was  a  poet  of  the  imagination  even  more  than  of  the 
intellect.  This  is  a  flower  that  has  blossomed  out  of  the 
vast  swamps  of  the  anthropologists.  It  is  the  song 
of  the  ritual  of  initiation,  Mr.  Squire's  power  in  the 
sphere  both  of  the  grotesque  and  of  lovely  imagery  is 
revealed    in    the    triumphant    close    of    this    poem  : — 

And  the  surly  thick-lipped  men,  as  they  sit  about  their  huts 
Making  drums  out  of  guts,  grunting  gruffly  now  and  then, 
Carving  sticks  of  ivory,  stretching  shields  of  wrinkled  skin. 
Smoothing  sinister  and  thin  squatting  gods  of  ebony. 
Chip  and  grunt  and  do  not  see. 

But  each  mother,  silently. 
Longer  than  her  wont  stays  shut  in  the  dimness  of  her  hut. 
For  she  feels  a  brooding  cloud  of  memory  in  the  air, 
A  lingering  thing  there  that  makes  her  sit  bowed 
With  hollow  shining  eyes,  as  the  night-lire  dies. 
And  stare  softly  at  the  embers  and  try  to  remember 


MR.   J.   C.   SQUIRE  209 

Something  sorrowful  and  far,  somethint;  sweet  and  vayucly  seen 

Like  an  early  evening  star  wIumi  the  sky  is  pale  green  : 

A  quiet  silver  tower  that  climbed  in  an  hour. 

Or  a  ghost  like  a  flower,  or  a  flower  like  a  queen  : 

Something  holy  in  the  past  that  came  and  did  not  last. 

But  she  knows  not  what  it  was. 

It  is  easy  to  see  in  the  last  lines  that  Mr.  Squire 
has  escaped  finally  from  the  idealist's  disgust  to  the 
idealist's  exaltation.  He  has  learned  to  express  the 
beautiful  mystery  of  life  and  he  is  no  longer  haunted 
in  his  nerves  by  the  ugliness  of  circumstances.  Not 
that  he  has  shut  himself  up  in  an  enchanted  world  : 
he  still  remains  a  poet  of  this  agonizing  earth.  In 
The  Stronghold  he  summons  up  a  vision  of  "  easeful 
death,"  only  to  turn  aside  from  it  as  Christian  turned 
aside   from  the   temptations  on  his  way  : — 

But,  O,  if  you  find  that  castle, 

Draw  back  your  foot  from  the  gateway. 

Let  not  its  peace  invite  you. 

Let  not  its  offerings  tempt  you. 

For  faded  and  decayed  like  a  garment. 

Love  to  a  dust  will  have  fallen. 

And  song  and  laughter  will  have  gone  with  sorrow. 

And  hope  will  have  gone  with  pain  ; 

And  of  all  the  throbbing  heart's  high  courage 

Nothing  will  remain. 

And  these  later  poems  are  not  only  nobler  in  passion 
than  the  early  introspective  work  ;  they  are  also  more 
moving.  Few  of  the  "  in  memoriam  "  poems  of  the  war 
touch  the  heart  as  does  that  poem,  To  a  Build oi^,  with 
its  moving  close  : — 

And  though  you  run  expectant  as  you  always  do 

To  the  uniforms  we  meet, 
You  will  never  find  Willy  among  all  the  soldiers 

Even  in  the  longest  street. 

Nor  in  any  crowd  :  yet,  strange  and  bitter  thought. 

Even  now  were  the  old  words  said. 
If  I  tried  the  old  trick,  and  said  "  Where's  Willy  ?  " 

You  would  quiver  and  lift  your  bead. 

14 


210  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 


And  your  brown  eyes  would  look  to  ask  if  I  was  serious. 

And  wait  for  the  word  to  spring. 
Sleep  undisturbed  :   I  snan't  say  that  again. 

You  innocent  old  thing. 

I  must  sit,  not  speaking,  on  the  sofa, 

While  you  lie  there  asleep  on  the  floor  ; 
For  he's  suffered  a  thing  that  dogs  couldn't  dream  of. 

And  he  won't  be  coming  here  any  more. 

Of  the  new  poems  in  the  book,  one  of  the  most 
beautiful  is  August  Aloon.  The  last  verses  provide  an 
excellent  example  of  Mr.  Squire's  gift  both  as  a  painter 
of  things  and  a  creator  of  atmosphere  : — 

A  golden  half-moon  in  the  sky,  and  broken  gold  in  the  water. 

In  the  water,  tranquilly  severing,  joining,  gold  : 
Three  or  four  little  plates  of  gold  on  the  river  : 
A  little  motion  of  gold  between  the  dark  images 
Of  two  tall  posts  that  stand  in  the  grey  water. 
A  woman's  laugh  and  children  going  home. 
A  whispering  couple,  leaning  over  the  railings. 
And  somewhere,  a  little  splash  as  a  dog  goes  in. 

I  have  always  known  all  this,  it  has  always  been, 
There  is  no  change  anywhere,  nothing  will  ever  change 

I  heard  a  story,  a  crazy  and  tiresome  myth. 

Listen  !     Behind  the  twilight  a  deep,  low  sound 
Like  the  constant  shutting  of  very  distant  doors. 

Doors  that  are  letting  people  o\'er  there 

Out  to  some  other  place  beyond  the  end  of  the  sky. 

The  contrast  between  the  beauty  of  the  stillness  of 
the  moonlit  world  and  the  insane  intrusion  of  the  war 
into  it  has  not,  I  think,  been  suggested  so  express- 
ively in  any  other  poem. 

Now  that  these  poems  have  been  collected  into  a 
single  volume  it  is  possible  to  measure  the  author's 
stature.  His  book  will,  I  believe,  come  as  a  revelation 
to  the  majority  of  readers.      A  poet   of  original  music, 


MR,   J.   C.  SQUIRE  211 

of  an  original  mind,  of  an  original  imagination,  Mr. 
Squire  has  now  taken  a  secure  place  among  ili<'  men 
of  genius  of  to-day.  Poenis:  First  Series,  is  literary 
treasure  so  novel  and  so  abundant  that  I  can  no  longer 
regret,  as  I  once  did,  that  Mr.  Squire  has  said  fare- 
well to  the  brilliant  lighter-hearted  moods  of  Steps  to 
Parnassus  and  Tricks  of  the  Trade.  He  has  brought  us 
gifts  better  even  than  those. 


XXV 
MR.    JOSEPH    CONRAD 

1.  The  Making  of  an  Author 

Mr.   Joseph   Conrad  is  one  of  the  strangest  figures 
in    literature.      He    has    called    himself    "  the    most   un- 
literary   of   writers."      He  did   not    even   begin  to   write 
till   he   was    half-way   between    thirty    and    forty.      I    do 
not    like    to    be   more    precise    about    the    date,    because 
there  seems  to  be  some  doubt  as  to  the  year  in  which 
Mr.  Conrad  was  born.     Mr.  Hugh  Walpole,  in  his  brief 
critical    study    of    Mr.    Conrad,    gives    the    date    as    the 
6th  of  December,    1857  ;    the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica 
says      1856;      Mr.     Conrad     himself     declares     in     his 
reminiscences    that    he    was    "  nine    years    old    or    there- 
abouts "    in    1868,    which   would    bring   the   year  of   his 
birth    nearer    1859.       Of   one    thing,    however,    there    is 
no   question.      He   grew  up   without   any   impulse  to   be 
a   writer.      He    apparently  never   even   wrote    bad  verse 
in  his  teens.     Before  he  began  to  write  Almayer^s  Folly 
he  "  had  written  nothing  but  letters  and  not  very  many 
of  these."     "  I  never,"  he  declares,   "  made  a  note  of  a 
fact,  of  an  impression,  or  of  an  anecdote  in  my  life.     The 
ambition  of  being  an  author  had  never  turned  up  among 
those    precious    imaginary   existences  one    creates   fondly 
for    oneself    in   the    stillness    and    immobility    of   a    day- 
dream." 

At  the  same  time,  Mr.  Conrad's  is  not  a  genius  with- 
out parentage  or  pedigree.  His  father  was  not  only  a 
revolutionary,  but  in  some  degree  a  man  of  letters.  Mr. 
Conrad  tells  us  that  his  own  acquaintance  with  English 

212 


MR.   JOSEPH  CONRAD  218 


literature  began  at  the  age  of  eight  with  7  /ir  Two 
Gentlemen  of  Verona,  which  his  father  had  translated 
into  Polish.  He  has  given  us  a  picture  of  the  cliild  he 
then  was  (dressed  in  a  black  blouse  with  a  white  border 
in  mourning  for  his  mother)  as  he  knelt  in  his  father's 
study  chair,  "  with  my  elbows  on  the  table  and  my  brad 
held  in  both  hands  over  the  pile  of  loose  pages."  While 
he  was  still  a  boy  he  read  Hugo  and  Don  Quixote  and 
Dickens,  and  a  great  deal  of  history,  poetry,  and  travel. 
He  had  also  been  fascinated  by  the  map.  It  may  be 
said  of  him  even  in  his  childhood,  as  Sir  Thomas  Browne 
has  said  in  general  of  every  human  being,  that  Africa 
and  all  her  prodigies  were  within  him.  No  passage  in  his 
autobiography  suggests  the  first  prophecy  of  his  career 
so  markedly  as  that  in  which  he  writes  :  "It  was  in 
1868,  when  nine  years  old  or  thereabouts,  that  while 
looking  at  a  map  of  Africa  of  the  time  and  putting 
my  finger  on  the  blank  space  then  representing  the  un- 
solved mystery  of  that  continent,  I  said  to  myself  with 
absolute  assurance  and  an  amazing  audacity  which  arc 
no  longer  in  my  character  now  :  '  W^ien  I  grow  up  1 
shall  go  there.''  "  Mr.  Conrad's  genius,  his  conscious- 
ness of  his  destiny,  may  be  said  to  have  come  to  birth 
in  that  hour.  What  but  the  second  sight  of  genius 
could  have  told  this  inland  child  that  he  would  one  day 
escape  from  the  torturing  round  of  rebellion  in  which 
the  soul  of  his  people  was  imprisoned  to  the  sunless 
jungles  and  secret  rivers  of  Africa,  where  he  would 
find  an  imperishable  booty  of  wonder  and  monstrous 
fear?  Many  people  regard  Meart  of  Darkness  as  his 
greatest  story.  Heart  of  Darkness  surely  began  to  be 
written  on  the  day  on  which  the  boy  of  nine  "  or  there- 
abouts "  put  his  finger  on  the  blank  space  of  the  map 
of  Africa  and  prophesied. 

He  was  in  no  hurry,  however,  to  accomplish  his  destiny. 
Mr.  Conrad  has  never  been  in  a  hurry,  even  in  telling 
a  story.  He  has  waited  on  fate  rather  than  run  to 
meet   it.      "  I    was  never,"   he  declares,    "  one  of   those 


214  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

wonderful  fellows  that  would  go  afloat  in  a  washtub  for 
the   sake   of    the   fun."      On  the   other  hand,   he   seems 
always  to  have  followed  in  his  own  determined  fashion 
certain    sudden    intuitions,    much   as    great    generals    and 
saints  do.     Alexander  or  Napoleon  could  not  have  seized 
the  future  with  a  more  splendid  defiance  of  reason  than 
did  Mr.   Conrad,  when,  though  he  did  not  yet  know  six 
words  of  English,  he  came  to  the  resolve  :    "  If  a  sea- 
man,  then  an   English   seaman."      He   has   always  been 
obedient    to  a   star.      He  likes   to   picture   himself  as  a 
lazy  creature,  but  he  is  really  one  of  the  most  dogged  day- 
labourers  who  have  ever  served  literature.      In   Typhoon 
and   Youth  he   has  written  of  the   triumph  of   the  spirit 
of  man   over   tempest  and   fire.      We  may  see   in   these 
stories  not  only  the  record  of  Mr.  Conrad's  twenty  years' 
toil  as  a  seaman,  but  the  image  of  his  desperate  dogged- 
ness  as  an  aythor  writing  in  a  foreign  tongue.      "  Line 
by    line,"   he   writes,    "  rather   than  page    by   page,    was 
the    growth    of    Alniayer^s   Folly."'      He    has    earned  his 
fame  in  the  sweat  of  his  brow.     He  speaks  of  the  terrible 
bodily  fatigue   that   is  the   lot  of   the  imaginative  writer 
even   more    than   of    the    manual    labourer.      "  I    have," 
he    adds,    "  carried   bags   of    wheat    on    my    back,    bent 
almost   double   under  a  ship's   deck -beams,   from   six   in 
the  morning  till  six  in   the  evening    (with  an  hour  and 
a  half  off  for  meals),  so  I  ought  to  know."     He  declares, 
indeed,    that    the    strain   of    creative   effort    necessary   in 
imaginative  writing  is   "  something  for  which  a  material 
parallel   can   only    be   found    in    the    everlasting   sombre 
stress  of  the  westward  winter  passage  round  Capve  Horn." 
This    is   to   make   the   profession   of   literature  a    branch 
of   the  heroic   life.      And   that,   for  all  his   smiling   dis- 
paragement of  himself  as  a  Sybarite,  is  what  Mr.  Conrad 
has  done. 

It  is  all  the  more  curious  that  he  should  ever  have 
been  regarded  as  one  who  had  added  to  the  literature  of 
despair.  He  is  a  tragic  writer,  it  is  true  ;  he  is  the 
only    novelist    now    writing   in    English    with    the   grand 


MR.   JOSEPH   COMiAl)  215 

tragic  sense.  He  is  nearer  Webster  than  Sliakes[)car<-, 
perhaps,  in  the  mood  of  his  tragedy  ;  lie  litts  the  iiirtaiii 
upon  a  world  in  which  the  noble  and  the  beautiful  go 
down  before  an  almost  meaningless  malice.  In  The  linil 
of  the  Tether,  in  Freya  of  tlie  Seven  Isles,  in  Viefory, 
it  is  as  though  a  very  Nero  of  malice  who  took  a 
special  delight  in  the  ruin  of  great  spirits  governed 
events.  On  the  other  hand,  as  in  Samson  Ap;onistes,  so 
in  the  stories  of  Mr.  Conrad  we  are  confronted  with 
the  curious  paradox  that  some  deathless  (jualiiy  in  the 
dying  hero  forbids  us  utterly  to  despair.  Mr.  llarrly 
has  written  the  tragedy  of  man's  weakness  ;  Mr.  Conrad 
has  written  the  tragedy  of  man's  strength  "  with  courage 
never  to  submit  or  yield."  Though  Mr.  Conrad  possesses 
the  tragic  sense  in  a  degree  that  puts  him  among  the 
great  poets,  and  above  any  of  his  living  ri\als,  however, 
the  mass  of  his  Avork  cannot  be  called  tragic.  Youth, 
Typhoon,  Lord  Jim,  The  Secret  Sharer,  TIw  Shadow  I inc 
— are  not  all  these  fables  of  conquest  and  redemjjtion  .' 
Man  in  Mr.  Conrad's  stories  is  always  a  deficr  of  the 
devils,  and  the  devils  are  usually  put  to  flight. 

Though  he  is  eager  to  disclaim  being  a  moralist  or 
even  having  any  liking  for  moralists,  it  is  clear  that 
he  is  an  exceedingly  passionate  moralist  and  is  in  more 
ardent  imaginative  sympathy  with  the  duties  of  maji 
and  Burke  than  with  the  rights  of  man  and  Shelley.  Had 
it  not  been  so,  he  might  have  been  a  political  visionary 
and  stayed  at  home.  As  it  is,  this  son  of  a  Polish  rebel 
broke  away  from  the  wavering  aspirations  and  public 
dreams  of  his  revolutionary  countrymen,  and  found  salva- 
tion as  an  artist  in  the  companionship  of  simple  men 
at  sea. 

Some  such  tremendous  breach  with  the  past  was 
necessary  in  order  that  Mr.  Conrad  might  be  able  to 
achieve  his  destiny  as  an  artist.  No  one  but  an  inland 
child  could,  perhaps,  have  come  to  the  sea  with  such 
a  passion  of  discovery.  The  sea  to  most  of  us  is  a 
glory,   but    it    is   a   glory    of    our  everyday   earth.      Mr. 


216  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

Conrad,  in  his  discovery  of  the  sea,  broke  into  a  new 
and  wonder-studded  world,  Hke  some  great  adventurer 
of  the  Renaissance.  He  was  Hke  a  man  coming  out 
of  a  pit  into  the  Hght.  That,  I  admit,  is  too  simple 
an  image  to  express  all  that  going  to  sea  meant  to  Mr. 
Conrad.  But  some  such  image  seems  to  me  to  be 
necessary  to  express  that  element  in  his  writing  Avhich 
reminds  one  of  the  vision  of  a  man  who  has  lived 
much  underground.  He  is  a  dark  man  who  carries 
the  shadows  and  the  mysteries  of  the  pit  about  with 
him.  He  initiates  us  in  his  stories  into  the  romance 
of  Erebus.  He  leads  us  through  a  haunted  world  in 
which  something  worse  than  a  ghost  may  spring  on 
us  out  of  the  darkness.  Ironical,  sad,  a  spectator,  he 
is  nevertheless  a  writer  who  exalts  rather  than  dispirits. 
His  genius  moves  enlargingly  among  us,  a  very  spend- 
thrift of  treasure — ^treasure  of  recollection,  observation, 
imagery,  tenderness,  and  humour.  It  is  a  strange  thing 
that  it  was  not  until  he  pubhshed  Chance  that  the  world 
in  general  began  to  recognize  how  great  a  writer  was 
enriching  our  time.  Perhaps  his  own  reserve  was  partly 
to  blame  for  this.  He  tells  tis  that  all  the  "  characters  " 
he  ever  got  on  his  discharge  from  a  ship  contained  the 
words  "  strictly  sober,"  and  he  claims  that  he  has  observed 
the  same  sobriety — "  asceticism  of  sentiment,"  he  calls  it 
— in  his  literary  work  as  at  sea.  He  has  been  compared 
to  Dostoevsky,  but  in  his  quietism  he  is  the  very  opposite 
of  Dostoevsky — an  author,  indeed,  of  whom  he  has  written 
impatiently.  At  the  same  time,  Mr.  Conrad  keeps  open 
house  in  his  pages  as  Dostoevsky  did  for  strange  demons 
and  goblins — that  population  of  grotesque  characters  that 
links  the  modern  realistic  novel  to  the  fairy  tale.  His 
tales  are  tales  of  wonder.  He  is  not  only  a  philosopher 
of  the  bold  heart  under  a  sky  of  despair,  but  one  of 
the  magicians  of  literature.  That  is  why  one  reads 
the  volume  called  Youth  for  the  third  and  fourth  time 
with  even  more  enthusiasm  than  when  one  reads  it  for 
the  first, 


MR.   JOSEPH   COX  in  I)  217 


2.  Tales  of  Mystery 

Mr.  Joseph  Conrad  is  a  writer  wilh  a  Imc.  l-lxciy 
novelist  of  genius  is  that,  of  course,  to  some  extent. 
But  Mr.  Conrad  is  more  than  most.  He  has 
a  lure  like  some  lost  shore  in  the  tropics.  lie 
compels  to  adventure.  There  is  no  other  hvin<,'  writer 
who  is  sensitive  in  anythin.i;  like  the  same  degree  to 
the  sheer  mysteriousness  of  the  earth.  Every  man 
who  breathes,  every  woman  who  crosses  the  street,  every 
wind  that  blows,  every  ship  that  sails,  every  tide  that 
fills,  every  wave  that  breaks,  is  for  him  alive  with 
mystery  as  a  lantern  is  alive  with  light — a  little  light 
in  an  immense  darkness.  Or  perhaps  it  is  more  subtle 
than  that.  With  Mr.  Conrad  it  is  as  though  mystery, 
instead  of  dwelliiig  in  people  and  things  like  a  light, 
hung  about  them  like  an  aura.  Mr.  Kipling  com- 
municates to  us  aggressively  what  our  eyes  can  see. 
Mr.  Conrad  communicates  to  us  tentatively  what  only  "^ 
his  eyes  can  see,  and  in  so  doing  gives  a  new  significance 
to  things.  Occasionally  he  leaves  us  puzzled  as  to 
where  in  the  world  the  significance  can  lie.  But  of 
the  presence  of  this  significance,  this  mystery,  avc  are 
as  uncannily  certain  as  of  some  noise  that  \vc  have 
heard  at  night.  It  is  like  the  "  mana  "  which  savages 
at  once  reverence  and  fear  in  a  thousand  objects.  It 
is  unlike  "  mana,"  however,  in  that  it  is  a  quality  not 
of  sacredness,  but  of  romance.  It  is  as  though  for 
Mr.  Conrad  a  ghost  of  romance  inhabited  every  tree 
and  every  stream,  every  ship  and  every  human  being. 
His  function  in  literature  is  the  announcement  of  this 
ghost.  In  all  his  M'ork  there  is  some  haunting  and 
indefinable  element  that  draAvs  us  into  a  kind  of  ghost- 
stor>^  atmosphere  as  we  read.  His  ships  and  men  are, 
in  an  old  sense  of  the  word,  possessed. 

One  might  compare  Mr.  Conrad  in  this  respect  with 
his  master— his  master,  at  least,  in  the  art  of  the  long 
^Qvel— Henry    James.      I    do    not    mean    that    in    the 


218  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

matter  of  his  genius  Mr.  Conrad  is  not  entirely  original. 
Henry  James  could  no  more  have  written  Mr.  Conrad's 
stories  than  Mr.  Conrad  could  have  written  Henry 
James's.  His  manner  of  discovering  significance  in 
insignificant  things,  however,  is  of  the  school  of  Henry 
James.  Like  Henry  James,  he  is  a  psychologist  in 
everything  down  to  descriptions  of  the  weather.  It 
can  hardly  be  questioned  that  he  has  learned  more 
of  the  business  of  psychology  from  Henry  James  than 
from  any  other  writer.  As  one  reads  a  story  like 
Chance,  however,  one  feels  that  in  psychology  Mr. 
Conrad  is  something  of  an  amateur  of  genius,  while 
Henry  James  is  a  professor.  Mr.  Conrad  never  gives 
the  impression  of  having  used  the  dissecting-knife  and 
the  microscope  and  the  test-tubes  as  Henry  James  does. 
He  seems  rather  to  be  one  of  the  splendid  guessers. 
Not  that  Henry  James  is  timid  in  speculations.  He 
can  sally  out  into  the  borderland  and  come  back  with 
his  bag  of  ghosts  like  a  very  hero  of  credulity.  Even 
when  he  tells  a  ghost  story,  however — and  The  Turn 
of  the  Screw  is  one  of  the  great  ghost  stories  of 
literature — he  remains  supremely  master  of  his  materials. 
He  has  an  efficiency  that  is  scientific  as  compared 
with  the  vaguer  broodings  of  Mr.  Conrad.  .Where  Mr. 
Conrad  will  drift  into  discovery,  Henry  James  will  sail 
more  cunningly  to  his  end  with  chart  and  compass. 

One  is  aware  of  a  certain  deliberate  indolent  hither- 
and-thitherness  in  the  psychological  progress  of  Mr. 
Conrad's  Under  Western  Eyes,  for  instance,  Avhich  is 
never  to  be  found  even  in  the  most  elusive  of  Henry 
James's  novels.  Both  of  them  are,  of  course,  in  love 
with  the  elusive.  To  each  of  them  a  bird  in  the  bush 
is  worth  two  in  the  hand.  But  while  Henry  James's 
birds  perch  in  the  cultivated  bushes  of  botanical  gardens, 
Mr.  Conrad's  call  from  the  heart  of  natural  thickets — 
often  from  the  depths  of  the  jungle.  The  progress  of 
the  steamer  up  the  jungle  river  in  Heart  of  Darkness 
js   symbolic   of   his  method   as   a   writer.      He  goes  on 


MR.   JOSEPH  COX  RAD  iJlO 


and  on,  with  the  ogres  of  romance  always  lyini;  in 
wait  round  the  next  bend.  He  can  describe  liiinK's 
seen  as  well  as  any  man,  but  it  is  his  especial  genius 
to  use  things  seen  in  such  a  way  as  to  suggest  the 
unseen  things  that  are  waiting  round  the  corner.  Even 
when  he  is  portraying  human  beings,  like  Flora  dc. 
Barrel— the  daughter  of  the  defalcating  financier  and 
wife  of  the  ship's  captain,  who  is  the  heroine  of  Chance 
—he  often  permits  us  just  such  glimpses  of  them  as 
we  get  of  persons  hurrying  round  a  corner.  He  gives 
us  a  picture  of  disappearing  heels  as  the  portrait  (^f 
a  personality.  He  suggests  the  soul  of  wonder  in  a 
man  not  by  showing  him  realistically  as  he  is  so  much 
as  by  suggesting  a  mysterious  something  hidden,  some- 
thing on  the  horizon,  a  shadowy  island  seen  at  twilight. 
One  result  of  this  is  that  his  human  beings  are  seldom 
as  rotund  as  life.  They  are  emanations  of  personality 
rather  than  collections  of  legs,  arms,  and  bowels.  They 
are,  if  you  like,  ghostly.  That  is  why  they  will  never  be 
quoted  like  Hamlet  and  my  Uncle  Toby  and  Sam  Wcller. 
But  how  wonderful  they  are  in  their  environment  of 
the  unusual  !  How  wonderful  as  seen  in  the  light  of 
the  strange  eyes  of  their  creator  !  "  Having  grown 
extremely  sensitive  (an  effect  of  irritation)  to  the 
tonalities,  I  may  say,  of  the  affair  " — so  the  narrator 
of  Chance  begins  one  of  his  sentences  ;  and  it  is  not 
in  the  invention  of  new  persons  or  incidents,  but  in 
jiist  such  a  sensitiveness  to  the  tonalities  of  this  and 
that  affair  that  Mr.  Conrad  wins  his  laurels  as  a  writer 
of  novels.  He  would  be  sensitive,  I  do  not  doubt,  to  the 
tonalities  of  the  way  in  which  a  waitress  in  a  Lyons 
tea-shop  would  serve  a  limipy-shouldered  City  man  with 
tea  and  toasted  scone.  His  sensitiveness  only  becomes 
matter  for  enthusiasm,  however,  when  it  is  concerned 
with  little  man  in  conflict  with  destiny— when,  bare 
down  to  the  immortal  soul,  he  grapples  with  fate  and 
throws  it,  or  is  beaten  back  by  it  into  a  savage  of 
the  first  days. 


220  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Some  of  his  best  work  is  contained  in  the  two  stories 
Typhoon  and  The  Secret  Sharer,  the  latter  of  which 
appeared  in  the  volume  called  'Twixt  Land  and  Sea. 
And  each  of  these  is  a  fable  of  man's  mysterious' 
quarrel  with  fate  told  with  the  Conrad  sensitiveness, 
the  dark  Conrad  irony,  and  the  Conrad  zest  for  courage. 
These  stories  are  so  great  that  while  we  read  them 
we  almost  forget  the  word  "  psychology."  We  are 
swept  off  our  feet  by  a  tide  of  heroic  literature.  Each 
of  the  stories,  complex  though  Mr.  Conrad's  interest 
in  the  central  situation  may  be,  is  radically  as  heroic 
and  simple  as  the  story  of  Jack's  fight  with  the  giants 
or  of  the  defence  of  the  round-house  in  Kidnapped.  In 
each  of  them  the  soul  of  man  challenges  fate  with; 
its  terrors  :  it  dares  all,  it  risks  all,  it  invades  and 
defeats  the  darkness.  Typhoon  was,  I  fancy,  not 
consciously  intended  as  a  dramatization  of  the  struggle 
between  the  soul  and  the  Prince  of  the  power  of  the 
air.  But  it  is  because  it  is  eternally  true  as  such  a 
dramatization  that  it  is — let  us  not  shrink  from  praise 
— one  of  the  most  overwhelmingly  fine  short  stories  in 
literature.  It  is  the  story  of  an  unconquerable  soul 
even  more  than  of  an  unconquerable  ship.  One  feels 
that  the  ship's  struggles  have  angels  and  demons  for 
spectators,  as  time  and  again  the  storm  smashes  her 
and  time  and  again  she  rises  alive  out  of  the  pit 
of  the  waters.  They  are  an  affair  of  cosmic  relevance 
as  the  captain  and  the  mate  cling  on,  watching  the 
agonies   of   the   steamer. 

Opening  their  eyes,  they  saw  the  masses  of  piled-up  foam  dash- 
ing to  and  fro  amongst  what  looked  like  fragments  of  the  ship. 
She  had  given  way  as  if  driven  straight  in.  Their  panting  hearts 
yielded  before  the  tremendous  blow  ;  and  all  at  once  she  sprang 
up  again  to  her  desperate  plunging,  as  if  trying  to  scramble  out 
from  under  the  ruins.  The  seas  in  the  dark  seemed  to  rush  from 
all  sides  to  keep  her  back  where  she  might  perish.  There  was 
hate  in  the  way  she  was  handled,  and  a  ferocity  in  the  blows  that 
fell.  She  was  like  a  Jiving  creature  thrown  to  the  rage  of  a  mob  : 
hystled   terribly,  struck  at,   borne  up,   liung  down,   leaped   upon. 


MR.   JOSEPH   COXRAD  221 


It  is  in  the  midst  of  these  bhiidiii'^,  dcalcniii^'-,  \vhirhnK^ 
drowning  terrors  that  we  seem  to  sec  the  captain  and 
the  mate  as  figures  symbolic  of  Mr.  Conrad's  heroic 
philosophy   of   Hfe. 

He  [the  mate]  poked  his  head  forward,  groping  (or  the  ear  ol 
his  commander.  His  hps  touched  it,  big,  fleshy,  very  wet.  H»; 
cried  in  an  agitated  tone,  "  Our  boats  are  going  now,  sir." 

And  again  he  heard  that  voice,  forced  and  ringing  fot-bly,  but 
with  a  penetrating  effect  ot  quietness  m  the  enormous  discord 
of  noises,  as  if  sent  out  from  some  remote  spot  of  peace  beyond 
the  black  vv^astes  of  the  gale  ;  again  he  heard  a  man's  voire — the 
frail  and  indomitable  sound  that  can  be  made  to  carry  an  infinity 
of  thought,  lesolution,  and  purpose,  that  sliall  be  pronouncing 
confident  words  on  the  last  day,  when  the  heavens  fall  and  justice 
is  done — again  he  heard  it,  and  it  was  crying  to  him,  as  if  from 
very,  very  far  :  "  All  right." 

Mr.  Conrad's  work,  I  have  already  suggested,  belongs 
to  the  literature  of  confidence.  It  is  the  literature  of 
great  hearts  braving  the  perils  of  the  darkness.  He 
is  imaginatively  never  so  much  at  home  as  in  the 
night,  but  he  is  aware  not  only  of  the  night,  but  of 
the  stars.  Like  a  cheer  out  of  the  dark  comes  that 
wonderful  scene  in  The  Secret  Sharer  in  which,  at 
infinite  risk,  the  ship  is  sailed  in  close  under  the  looming 
land  in  order  that  the  captain  may  give  the  hidden 
manslayer  a  chance  of  escaping  unnoticed  to  the  land. 
This,  is  a  story  in  which  the  "  tonalities  of  the  affair  " 
are  much  more  subtle  than  in  Typhoon.  It  is  a  study 
in  eccentric  human  relations — the  relations  between  the 
captain  and  the  manslayer  who  comes  naked  out  of 
the  seas  as  if  from  nowhere  one  tropical  night,  and  is 
huddled  away  with  his  secrets  in  the  captain's  cabin. 
It  is  for  the  most  part  a  comedy  of  the  abnormal— 
an  ironic  fable  of  splendid  purposeless  fears  and  risks. 
Towards  the  end,  however,  we  lose  our  concern  with 
nerves  and  relationships  and  such  things,  and  our  hearts 
pause  as  the  moment  approaches  when  the  captain 
ventures  his  ship  in  order  to  save  the  interloper's  life. 


222  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

That  is  a  moment  with  all  romance  in  it.  As  the 
ship  swerves  round  into  safety  just  in  the  nick  of 
time,  we  have  a  story  transfigured  into  the  music  of 
the  triumphant  soul.  Mr.  Conrad,  as  w*e  see  in  Freya 
of  the  Seven  Isles  and  elsewhere,  is  not  blind  to  the 
commonness  of  tragic  ruin — tragic  ruin  against  which 
no  high-heartedness  seems  to  avail.  He  is,  indeed, 
inclined  rather  than  otherwise  to  represent  fate  as  a 
monstrous  spider,  unaccountable,  often  maleficent,  hard 
to  run  away  from.  But  he  loves  the  fantastic  comedy 
of  the  high  heart  which  persists  in  the  heroic  game 
against  the  spider  till  the  bitter  end.  His  Youth  is 
just  such  a  comedy  of  the  peacockry  of  adventure  amid 
the  traps  and  disasters  of  fate. 

All  this  being  so,  it  may  be  thought  that  I  have 
underestimated  the  flesh-and-blood  qualities  in  Mr. 
Conrad's  work.  I  certainly  do  not  want  to  give  the 
impression  that  his  men  are  less  than  men.  They  are 
as  manly  men  as  ever  breathed.  But  Mr.  Conrad 
seldom  attempts  to  give  us  the  complete  synthesis  of  a 
man.,  He  deals  rather  in  aspects  of  personality.  His 
longer  books  would  hold  us  better  if  there  were  some 
overmastering  characters  in  them.  In  reading  such  a 
book  as  Under  W.estern  Eyes  we  feel  as  though  we 
had  here  a  precious  alphabet  of  analysis,  but  that  it 
has  not  been  used  to  spell  a  magnificent  man. 

Worse  than  this,  Mr.  Conrad's  long  stories  at  times 
come  out  as  awkwardly  as  an  elephant  being  steered 
backwards  through  a  gate.  He  pauses  frequently  to 
impress  upon  us  not  only  the  romance  of  the  fact  he 
is  stating  but  the  romance  of  the  circumstances  in 
which  somebody  discovered  it.  In  Chance  and  Lord 
Jim  he  is  not  content  to  tell  us  a  straightforward  story  : 
he  must  show  us  at  length  the  processes  by  which  it  was 
pieced  together.  This  method  has  its  advantages.  It 
gives  us  the  feeling,  as  I  have  said,  that  we  are  voyaging 
into  strange  seas  and  harbours  in  search  of  mysterious 
clues.      But  the  fatig:ue  of  reconstruction  is  apt  to  tell 


MR.   JOSEPH   CONRAD  223 

on  us  before  the  end.  One  gets  tired  of  the  thing  just 
as  one  does  ot  interviewing  a  host  of  strangers.  Tliat 
is  why  some  people  fail  to  get  througli  Mr.  Conrad's 
long  novels.  They  are  books  of  a  thousand  fascina- 
tions, but  the  best  imagination  in  them  is  by  the  way. 
Besides  this,  they  have  little  of  the  economy  of  dramatic 
writing,  but  are  profusely  descriptive,  and  most  jjeople 
are  timid  of  an  epic  of  description. 

Mr,  Conrad's  best  work,  then,  is  to  he  found,  ,1 
agree  with  most  people  in  believing,  in  three  of  his 
volumes  of  short  stories — in  Typhoon,  Youth,  and  'TMxt 
Land  and  Sea.  His  fame  will,  I  imagine,  rest  chiefly 
on  these,  just  as  the  fame  of  Wordsworth  and  Keats 
rests  on  their  shorter  poems.  Here  is  the  pure  gold 
of  his  romance — written  in  terms  largely  of  the  life 
of  the  old  sailing-ship.  Here  he  has  written  little 
epics  of  man's  destiny,  tragic,  ironic,  and  heroic,  which 
are  unique  in  modern  (and,  it  is  safe  to  say,  in  all) 
literature. 


XXVI 
MR.    RUDYARD    KIPLING 

1.  The  Good  Story-teller 

Mr.  Kipling  is  an  author  whom  one  has  loved  and 
hated  a  good  deal.  One  has  loved  him  as  the  eternal 
schoolboy  revelling  in  smells  and  bad  language  and 
dangerous  living.  One  has  loved  him  less,  but  one 
has  at  least  listened  to  him,  as  the  knowing  youth 
who  could  tell  one  all  about  the  ladies  of  Simla.  One 
has  found  him  rather  adorable  as  the  favourite  uncle 
with  the  funny  animal  stories.  One  has  been  amazed 
by  his  magniiicent  make-believe  as  he  has  told  one 
about  dim  forgotten  peoples  that  have  disappeared  under 
the  ground.  One  has  detested  him,  on  the  other  hand, 
as  the  evangelist  with  the  umbrella— the  little  Anglo- 
Indian  Prussian  who  sing  hymns  of  hate  and  Hempire. 
Luckily,  this  last  Kipling  is  allowed  an  entirely  free 
voice  only  in  verse.  If  one  avoids  Barrack  Room 
Ballads  and  The  Seven  Seas,  one  misses  the  worst  of 
him.  He  visits  the  prose  stories,  too,  it  is  true,  but 
he  does  not  dominate  them  in  the  same  degree.  Prose 
is  his  easy  chair,  in  wtliich  his  genius  as  a  humorist 
and  anecdotalist  can  expand.  Verse  is  a  platform  that 
tempts  him  at  one  moment  into  the  performance  of 
music-hall  turns  and  the  next  into  stump  orations  the 
spiritual  home  of  which  is  Hyde  Park  Corner  rather 
than  Parnassus.  Recessional  surprises  one  like  a  noble 
recantation  of  nearly  all  the  other  verse  Mr.  Kipling 
has  written.  But,  apart  from  Recessional,  most  of 
his  political  verse  is  a  mere  quickstep  of  bragging 
and  sneering. 

224 


MR.    IWDYAUn    KIPLISG  225 


\ 


His  iprose,  certainly,  s'taiuls  a  iliinl  or  ;i  jomth 
reading,  as  his  verse  does  not.  Kven  in  a  world  whi(  h 
Henry  James  and  Mr.  C:onra(l  haw  taught  to  stmly 
motives  and  atmospheres  with  an  almost  scientilic  care- 
fulness, Air.  Kipling's  *'  well-hammered  anecdotes,"  as 
Mr.  George  Moore  once  described  the  stories,  still  refuse 
to  bore  us. 

At  the  same  time,  they  make  a  different  appe.il  to  us 
from  their  appeal  of  twenty  or  twenty-five  years  ago.  In 
the  early  days,  we  half-worshipped  Mr.  Kipling  because 
he  told  us  true  stories.  Now  we  enjoy  him  because  he 
tells  us  amusing  stories.  He  conquered  us  at  hrst 
by  making  us  think  him  a  realist.  He  was  the  man 
who  knew.  We  listened  to  him  like  children  drinking 
in  travellers'  tales.  He  bluffed  us  with  his  cocksure  way 
of  talking  about  things,  and  by  addressing  us  in  a 
mysterious  jargon  which  we  regarded  as  a  proof  of 
his  intimacy  with  the  barrack-room,  the  engine-room, 
the  racecourse,  and  the  lives  of  generals,  Hindus,  artists, 
and  East-enders.  That  was  Mr.  Kipling's  trirk.  He 
assumed  the  realistic  manner  as  Jacob  assumed  the 
hairy  hands  of  Esau.  He  compelled  us  to  believe 
him  by  describing  with  elaborate  detail  the  setting  of 
his  story.  And,  having  once  got  us  in  the  mood  of 
belief,  he  proceeded  to  spin  a  yarn  tliat  as  often  as 
not  was  as  unlike  life  as  A  Yankee  at  the  Court  of  Kin^ 
Arthur.  His  characters  are  inventions,  not  portraits. 
Even  the  dialects  they  speak — dialects  which  used  to 
be  enthusiastically  spoken  of  as  masterly  achievements 
of  realism— are  ludicrously  false  to  life,  as  a  page  of 
iMulvaney's  or  Ortheris's  talk  will  quickly  make  clear 
to  any  one  who  knows  the  real  thing.  But  with  what 
humour  the  stories  are  told  I  Mr.  Kipling  does 
undoubtedly  possess  the  genius  of  humour  and  energy. 
There  are  false  touches  in  the  boys'  conversation  in 
The  Drums  of  the  Fore  and  Aft,  but  the  humour  and 
energy  with  which  the  progress  of  the  regiment  to 
the  frontier,  its  disgrace  and  its  rescue  by  the  drunken 

15 


226  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

children,     are    described,    make    it    one    of    the    most 
admirable  short  stories  of  our  time. 

His  humour,  it  must  be  admitted,  is  akin  to  the 
picaresque.  It  is  amusing  to  reflect  as  one  looks  round 
the  disreputable  company  of  Mr.  Kipling's  characters, 
that  his  work  has  now  been  given  a  place  in  the 
library  of  law  and  order.  When  Stalky  and  Co.  was 
published,  parents  and  schoolmasters  protested  in  alarm, 
and  it  seemed  doubtful  for  a  time  whether  Mr.  Kipling 
was  to  be  reckoned  among  the  enemies  of  society. 
If  I  am  not  mistaken.  The  Spectator  came  down  on 
the  side  of  Mr.  Kipling,  and  his  reputation  as  a 
respectable  author  was  saved. 

But    the    parents    and    the    schoolmasters    were    not 
nervous    without   cause.      Mr.    Kipling   is    an    anarchist 
in  his  preferences  to  a  degree  that  no  bench  of  bishops 
could    approve.      He    is,    within    limits,    on    the    side   of 
the  Ishmaelites — the  bad  boys  of  the  school,  the  "  rips  " 
of    the    regiment.       His    books    are    the    praise    of    the 
Ishmaelitish   life  in  a  world  of  law   and   order.      They 
are    seldom   the   praise   of   a    law   and    order   life   in    a 
world    of   law   and  order.      Mr.    Kipling   demands   only 
one  loyalty  (beyond  mutual  loyalty)  from  his  characters. 
His    schoolboys    may    break    every    rule    in    the    place, 
provided    that    somewhere    deep    down    in    their    hearts 
they  are  loyal  to  the   "  Head."      His  pet  soldiers  may 
steal   dogs   or   get   drunk,    or   behave    brutally    to   their 
heart's     content,     on     condition     that     they     cherish     a 
sentimental   affection  for   the   Colonel.      Critics   used   to 
explain    this    aspect   of   Mr.    Kipling's    work    by    saying 
that  he  likes  to  show  the  heart  of  good  in  thing's  evil. 
But  that  is  not  really  a  characteristic  of  his  work.     What 
he    is   most   interested  in   is   neither   good   nor  evil  but 
simply  roguery.      As  an  artist,  he  is  a  born  rebel  and 
lover   of  mischief.      As   a   politician    he   is   on   the   side 
of    the    judges    and    the    lawyers.       It    was    his    politics 
and   not  his   art  that  ultimately  made  him  the  idol  of 
the  genteel  world. 


MR.   RUDYARD   KIPL1\G  2'J7 


2.  The  Poet  of  Life  with  a  Capital  Hell 

Everybody  who  is  older  than  a  scliuoiboy  remembrrs 
how-  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling  was  once  a  modern.  He 
might,  indeed,  have  been  described  at  the  time  as  a 
Post-Imperialist.  Raucous  and  young,  \\v  had  N'fi 
behind  him  the  ornate  Imperialism  of  Disraeli,  on  the 
one  hand,  and  the  cultured  Imperialism  of  Tennyson, 
on  the  other.  He  sang  of  Im]H'rialism  as  ii  wa-., 
or  was  about  to  be — vulgar  and  canting  and  bloody  — 
and  a  world  that  was  preparing  itself  for  an  Imperialism 
that  would  be  vulgar  and  canting  and  bloody  bade  him 
welcome.  In  one  breath  he  would  give  y(ju  an  invoca- 
tion to  Jehovah.  In  the  next,  with  a  dig  in  the  ribs, 
he  would  be  getting  round  the  roguish  side  of  you  with 
the  assurance  that  : — 

If  you've  ever  stole  a  pheasant-egg  behind  tlie  keeper's  back. 
If  you've  ever  snigged  the  washin'  from  the  Hne, 

If  you've  ever  crammed  a  gander  in  your  bloomin'  'aversack. 
You  will  understand  this  little  song  o'  mine. 

This  jumble — which  seems  so  curious  nowadays — of 
delight  in  piety  and  delight  in  twopence-coloured 
mischiefs  came  as  a  glorious  novelty  and  respite  to 
the  oppressed  race  of  Victorians.  Hitherto  they  had 
been  building  up  an  Empire  decently  and  in  order  ; 
no  doubt,  many  reprehensible  things  were  being  done, 
but  they  were  being  done  quietly  :  outwardly,  so  far 
as  was  possible,  a  respectable  front  was  preserved.  It 
was  Mr.  Kipling's  distinction  to  tear  off  the  mask  of 
Imperialism  as  a  needless  and  irritating  encumbrance  ; 
he  had  too  much  sense  of  reality— too  much  humour, 
indeed— to  want  to  portray  Empire-builders  as  a 
company  of  plaster  saints.  Like  an  en j ant  terrible, 
he  was  ready  to  proclaim  aloud  a  host  of  things  which 
had,  until  then,  been  kept  as  decorously  in  the  dark 
as  the  skeleton  in  the  family  cupboard.  The  thousand 
and   one   incidents  of  lust   and   loot,  of  dishonesty  and 


228  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 

brutality  and  drunkenness — all  of  those  things  to  which 
builders  of  Empire,  like  many  other  human  beings,  are 
at  times  prone — he  never  dreamed  of  treating  as  matters 
to  be  hushed  up,  or,  apparently,  indeed,  to  be  regretted. 
He  accepted  them  quite  frankly  as  all  in  the  day's 
work  ;  there  was  even  a  suspicion  of  enthusiasm  in 
the  heartiness  with  which  he  referred  to  them. 
Simple  old  clergymen,  with  a  sentimental  vision  of  an 
Imperialism  that  meant  a  chain  of  mission-stations 
(painted  red)  encircling  the  earth,  suddenly  found  them- 
selves called  upon  to  sing  a  new  psalm  : — 

Ow,  the  loot ! 
Bloomin'  loot  ! 
That's  the  thing  to  make  the  boys  git  up  an'  shoot ! 
It's  the  same  with  dogs  an'  men. 
If  you'd  make  'em  come  again. 
Clap  'em  forward  with  a  Loo  !  Loo  !  Lulu  !  Loot  ! 
WTioopee  !     Tear  'im,  puppy  !     Loo  !     Loo  !     Lulu  !     Loot ! 
Loot !     Loot ! 

Frankly,  I  wish  Mr.  Kipling  had  always  written  in 
this  strain.  It  might  have  frightened  the  clergymen 
away.  Unfortunately,  no  sooner  had  the  old-fashioned 
among  his  readers  begun  to  show  signs  of  nervousness 
than  he  would  suddenly  feel  in  the  mood  for  a  tune 
on  his  Old  Testament  harp,  and,  taking  it  down,  would 
twang  from  its  strings  a  lay  of  duty.  "  Take  up," 
he  would  sing — 

Take  up  the  White  Man's  burden. 

Send  forth  the  best  ye  breed. 
Go,  bind  your  sons  to  exile. 

To  serve  your  captives'  need  ; 
To  wait  in  heavy  harness 

On  fluttered  folk  and  wild — 
Your  new-caught,  sullen  peoples. 

Half-devil  and  half-child. 

Little  Willie,  in  the  tracts,  scarcely  dreamed  of  a 
thornier  path  of  self-sacrifice.  No  wonder  the  senti- 
mentalists  were   soon  all  dancing  to   the   new   music — 


MR.   RUDYARD   KIPLISG  229 


music  which,  perhaps,  had  more  ol  the  harmonium 
than  the  harp  in  it,  but  was  none  the  less  suited  on 
that   account  to   its  revivalistic  purix)sc. 

At  the  same  time,  much  as  we  may  liave  been 
attracted  to  Mr.  Kipling  in  his  Sabljaih  moods,  it  was 
with  what  we  may  call  his  Saturday  night  moods  that 
he  first  won  the  enthusiasm  of  the  young  men.  They 
loved  him  for  his  bad  language  long  bef(jrc  he  had 
ever  preached  a  sermon  or  written  a  leading  article  in 
verse.  His  literary  adaptation  of  the  unmeasured  talk 
of  the  barrack-room  seemed  to  initiate  them  into  a 
life  at  once  more  real  and  more  adventurous  than  the 
quiet  three-meals -a-day  ritual  of  their  homes.  He  sang 
of  men  who  defied  the  laws  of  man  ;  still  more  exciting, 
he  sang  of  men  who  defied  the  laws  of  God.  Every 
oath  he  loosed  rang  heroically  in  the  ear  like  a  challenge 
to  the  universe  ;  for  his  characters  talked  in  a  daring, 
swearing  fashion  that  was  new  in  literature.  One 
remembers  the  bright-eyed  enthusiasm  with  which  very 
young  men  used  to  repeat  to  each  other  lines  like  the 
one    in    The    Ballad   of    "  The    Bolivar,''    which    runs — 

Boys,  the  wheel  has  gone  to  Hell — ng  the  winches  aft  ! 

Not  that  anybody  knew,  or  cared,  what  "  rigging  the 
winches  aft  "  meant.  It  was  the  familiar  and  fearless 
commerce  with  hell  that  seemed  to  give  literature  a 
new  horizon.  Similarly,  it  was  the  eternal  fiamcs  in 
the  background  that  made  the  tattered  figure  of  Gunga 
Din,  the  water-carrier,  so  favourite  a  theme  with  virgins 
and  boys.  With  what  delight  they  would  quote  the 
verse  : — 

So  I'll  meet  'im  later  on, 

At  the  place  where  'e  is  gone — 
Where  it's  always  double  drill  and  nn  canteen  ; 

'E'll  be  squattin'  on  the  co;ils, 

Givin'  drink  to  poor  damned  souls, 
An'  I'll  get  a  swig  in  heii  from  Gunga  Din! 


230  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 

Ever  since  the  days  of  Aucassin,  indeed,  who  praised 
hell  as  the  place  whither  were  bound  the  men  of  fashion 
and  the  good  scholars  and  the  courteous  fair  ladies, 
youth  has  taken  a  strange,  heretical  delight  in  hell 
and  damnation.  Mr.  Kipling  offered  new  meats  to 
the   old   taste. 

Gentlemen-rankers,  out  on  the  spree, 
Damned  from  here  to  eternity, 

began  to  wear  halos  in  the  undergraduate  imagination. 
Those   "  seven  men  from  out  of  Hell  "  who  went 

RoUing  down  the  Ratchft  Road, 
Drunk,  and  raising  Cain, 

were  men  with  whom  youth  would  have  rejoiced  to 
shake  hands.  One  even  wrote  bad  verses  oneself  in 
those    days,    in   which   one   loved   to    picture   oneself   as 

Cursed  with  the  curse  of  Reuben, 
Seared  witli  the  brand  of  Cain, 

though  so  far  one's  most  desperate  adventure  into  reality 
had  been  the  consumption  of  a  small  claret  hot  with 
a  slice  of  lemon  in  it  in  a  back-street  public-house. 
Thus  Mr.  Kipling  brought  a  new  violence  and  wonder, 
a  sort  of  debased  Byronism,  into  the  imagination  of 
youth  ;  at  least,  he  put  a  crown  upon  the  violence 
and  wonder  which  youth  had  long  previously  discovered 
for  itself  in  penny  dreadfuls  and  in  its  rebellion  against 
conventions  and  orthodoxies. 

It  may  be  protested,  however,  that  this  is  an  in- 
complete account  of  Mr.  KipHng's  genius  as  a  poet. 
He  does  something  more  in  his  verse,  it  may  be  urged, 
than  drone  on  the  harmonium  of  Imperialism,  and 
transmute  the  language  of  the  Ratcliff  Road  into  polite 
literature.  That  is  quite  true.  He  owes  his  fame 
partly  also  to  the  brilHance  with  which  he  talked 
adventure  and  talked  "  shop  "  to  a  generation  that  was 
exceptionally    greedy    for    both.      He,    more    than    any. 


MB.   KUDYARD   KIPLIXG  231 


other  writer  of  his  time,  set  to  baiijo-inusic  ihc 
restlessness  of  the  young-  man  who  would  not  stay  at 
home — the  romance  of  the  man  who  lived  and  laboured 
at  least  a  thousand  miles  away  from  the  home  of  his 
fathers.  He  excited  the  imagination  of  youth  with 
deft  questions  such  as — 

Do  5'on  know  the  pilc-built  village,  where  the  sago-dcalcrs  trade — 
Do  you   know  the  reek  of  fish  and   wet  bamboo  ? 

If  you  did  not  know  all  about  the  sago-dcalcrs  and 
the  fish  and  the  wet  bamboo,  Mr.  Kipling  had  a  way 
of  making  you  feel  unpardonably  ignorant  ;  and  the 
moral  of  your  ignorance  always  was  that  you  must 
"go — go — go  away  from  here."  Hence  an  inmicnse 
increase  in  the  number  of  passages  booked  to  the 
colonies.  Mr.  Kipling,  in  his  verse,  simply  acted  as 
a  gorgeous  poster-artist  of  Empire.  And  even  those 
who  resisted  his  call  to  adventure  were  hypnotized  by 
his  easy  and  lavish  manner  of  talking  "  shop."  He 
could  talk  the  "  shop  "  of  the  army,  the  sea,  the  engine- 
room,  the  art-school,  the  charwoman  ;  he  was  a  perfect 
young  Bacon  of  omniscience.  How  we  thrilled  at  the 
unintelligible  jingle  of  the  Anchor  Song,  with  its  cunning 
blend    of    "  shop  "    and    adventure  :— 

Heh  !     Tally  on.       Aft  and  walk  away  with  her  ! 
Handsome  to  the  cathead,  now  !     O  tally  on  the  fall  1 
Stop,  seize,  and  fish,  and  easy  on  the  davit-guy. 
Up,  well  up,  the  fluke  of  her,  and  inboard  haul  ! 

Well,  ah,  fare  you  well  for  the  Channel  wind's  took  hold  of  us. 
Choking  down  our  voices  as  we  snatch  the  gaskets  free. 

And  its  blowing  up  for  night. 

And  she's  dropping  light  on  light, 
And  she's  snorting  and  she's  snatching  for  a  breath  of  open  sea. 

The  worst  of  Mr.  Kipling  is  that,  in  verse  like  this, 
he  is  not  only  omniscient  ;  he  is  knowing.  He  mistakes 
knowingness  for  knowledge.  He  even  mistakes  it  for 
wisdom  at  times,  as  when  he  writes,  not  of  ships,  but 


232  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

of  women.  His  knowing  attitude  to  women  makes 
some  of  his  verse — not  very  much,  to  be  quite  fair — 
absolutely  detestable.  The  Ladies  seems  to  me  the 
vulgarest  poem  written  by  a  man  of  genius  in  our  time. 
As  one  reads  it,  one  feels  how  right  Oscar  Wilde  was 
when  he  said  that  Mr.  Kipling  had  seen  many  strange 
things  through  keyholes.  Mr.  Kipling's  defenders  may 
reply  that,  in  poems  like  this,  he  is  merely  dramatizing 
the  point  of  view  of  the  barrack-room.  But  it  is  unfair 
to  saddle  the  barrack-room  with  responsibility  for  the 
view  of  women  which  appears  here  and  elsewhere  in 
the  author's  verse.  One  is  conscious  of  a  kind  of 
malign  cynicism  in  Mr.  Kipling's  own  attitude,  as  one 
reads    The   Young  British  Soldier,  with  a   verse  like — 

If  your  wife  should  go  wrong  with  a  comrade,  be  loth 
To  shoot  when  you  catch  'em- — you'll  swing,  on  my  oath  ! — 
Make  'im  take  'er  and  keep  'er  ;  that's  hell  for  them  both. 
And  you're  shut  o'  the  curse  of  a  soldier. 

That  seems  to  me  fairly  to  represent  the  level  of 
Mr.  Kipling's  poetic  wisdom  in  regard  to  the  relations 
between  the  sexes.  It  is  the  logical  result  of  the  key- 
hole view  of  life.  And,  similarly,  his  Imperialism  is 
a  mean  and  miserable  thing  because  it  is  the  result 
of  a  keyhole  view  of  humanity.  Spiritually,  Mr.  Kipling 
may  be  said  to  have  seen  thousands  of  miles  and 
thousands  of  places  through  keyholes.  In  him,  wide 
wanderings  have  produced  the  narrow  mind,  and  an 
Elnpire  has  become  as  petty  a  thing  as  the  hoard 
in  a  miser's  garret.  Many  of  his  poems  are  simply 
miser's  shrieks  when  the  hoard  seems  to  be  threatened. 
He  cannot  even  praise  the  flag  of  his  country  without 
a   shrill  note  of  malice  : — 

Winds  of  the  world,  give  answer  !     They  are  whimpering  to  and 

fro— 
And  what  should  they  know  of  England  who  only  England  know  ? 
The  poor  little  street-bred  people,  that  vapour,  and  fume,  and  brag. 
They  are  lifting  their  heads  in  the  stillness,  to  yelp  at  the  Enghsh 

flag  ! 


MR.   RUDYARD  KIPLING  23a 

Mr.   Kipling  is  a  good  judge  of  yol[)ing. 

The  truth  is^  Mr.  Kipling  has  put  the  worst  of  his 
genius  into  his  poetry.  His  verses  have  brazen  "  go  " 
and  lively  colour  and  something  of  the  music  of  travel  ; 
but  they  are  too  iUiberal,  too  snappish,  loo  knowing,  lo 
afford  deep  or  permanent  pleasure  to  the  human  spirit. 


XXVII 
MR.    THOMAS    HARDY 

1.  His  Genius  as  a  Poet 

Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  in  the  opinion  of  some,  is  greater 
as  a  poet  than  as  a  novehst.  That  is  one  of  the  mild 
heresies  in  which  the  amateur  of  letters  loves  to  in- 
dulge. It  has  about  as  much  truth  in  it  as  the  statement 
that  Milton  was  greater  as  a  controversiaHst  than  as  a 
poet,  or  that  Lamb's  plays  are  better  than  his  essays. 
Mr.  Hardy  has  undoubtedly  made  an  original  con- 
tribution to  the  poetry  of  his  time.  But  he  has  given 
us  no  verse  that  more  than  hints  at  the  height  and  depth 
of  the  tragic  vision  which  is  expressed  in  Jude  the 
Obscure.  He  is  not  by  temperament  a  singer.  His 
music  is  a  still  small  voice  unevenly  matched  against 
his  consciousness  of  midnight  and  storm.  It  is  a  flutter 
of  wings  in  the  rain  over  a  tomb.  His  sense  of  beauty 
is  frail  and  midge-like  compared  with  his  sense  of  ever- 
lasting frustration.  The  conceptions  in  his  novels  are 
infinitely  more  poetic  than  the  conceptions  in  his  verse. 
In  Tess  and  Jude  destiny  presides  with  something  of  the 
grandeur  of  the  ancient  gods.  Except  in  The  Dynasts 
and  a  few  of  the  lyrics,  there  is  none  of  this  brooding 
majesty  in  his  verse.  And  even  in  The  Dynasts,  majestic 
as  the  scheme  of  it  is,  there  seems  to  me  to  be  more 
creative  imagination  in  the  prose  passages  than  in  the 
poetry. 

Truth  to  tell,  Mr.  Hardy  is  neither  sufficiently  articulate 
nor  sufficiently  fastidious  to  be  a  great  poet.  He  does 
not  express  life  easily  in  beautiful  words  or  in  images. 
There   is   scarcely   a  magical   image   in   the  hundred  or 

334  I 


MR.   THOMAS  TTARDY  235 


so  poems  in  the  book  of  his  selected  verse.  Thus  he 
writes  in  /  Found  Her  Out  There  of  one  who  :— 

would  sigh  at  the  talc 
Of  sunk  Lyoncsse 
As  a  wind-tugped  tress 
Flapped  her  cheek  like  a  Hail. 

There  could  not  be  an  ugher  and  more  prosaic  ex- 
aggeration than  is  contained  in  the  image  in  the  last 
line.  And  prose  intrudes  in  the  choice  of  words  as  well 
as  in  images.  Take,  for  example,  the  use  of  the  word 
"  domiciled  "  in  the  passage  in  the  same  poem  about— 

that  western  sea, 
As  it  swells  and  sobs, 
Where  she  once  domiciled. 

There  are  infelicities  of  the  same  kind  in  the  first  \crse 
of  the  poem  called  At  an  Inn  :— 

When  we,  as  strangers,  sought 

Their  catering  care, 
Veiled  smiles  bespoke  their  thought 

Of  what  we  were. 

They  warmed  as  they  opined 

Us  more  than  friends — 
That  we  had  all  resigned 

For  love's  dear  ends. 

"  Catering  care  "  is  an  appalling  phrase. 

I  do  not  wish  to  over-emphasize  the  significance  of 
flaws  of  this  kind.  But,  at  a  time  when  all  the  world 
is  eager  to  do  honour  to  Mr.  Hardy's  poems,  it  is  surely 
well  to  refrain  from  doing  equal  honour  to  his  faults. 
We  shall  not  appreciate  the  splendid  interpretation  of 
earth  in  TIw  Return  of  the  Native  more  highly  for 
persuading  ourselves  that  :— 

Intermissive  aim  at  the  thing  sufficeth. 

is  a  line  of  good  poetry.     Similarly  the  critic,  if  he  is  to 
enjoy  the  best  of  iMr.  Hardy,  must  also  be  resolute  not 


236  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 


to  shut  his  eyes  to  the  worst  in  such  a  verse  as  that  with 
which    A   Broken   Appointment  begins  :— 

You  did  not  come. 

And  marching  time  drew  on,  and  wore  me  numb, — 
Yet  less  for  loss  of  your  dear  presence  there 
Than  that  I  thus  found  lacking  in  your  make 
That  high  compassion  which  can  overbear 
Reluctance  for  pure  loving  kindness'  sake 
Grieved  I,  when,  as  the  hope-hour  stroked  its  sum. 
You  did  not  come. 

There  are  hints  of  the  grand  style  of  lyric  poetry  in 
these  lines,  but  phrases  like  "  in  your  make  "  and  "  as 
the  hope-hour  stroked  its  sum  "  are  discords  that  bring 
it  tumbling  to  the  levels  of  Victorian  commonplace. 

What  one   does   bless  Mr.    Hardy  for,   however,   both 
in  his  verse  and  in  his  prose,  is  his  bleak  sincerity.     He 
writes  out  of  the   reality  of  his   experience.      He  has  a 
temperament    sensitive    beyond    that    of    all    but    a    few 
recent  Avriters  to  the  pain  and  passion  of  human  beings. 
Especially   is   he   sensitive   to    the   pain   and   passion  of 
frustrated    lovers.      At    least   half    his    poems,    I    fancy, 
are  poems  of  frustration.     And  they  hold  us  under  the 
spell  of  reality   like  a  tragedy   in  a  neighbour's  house, 
even  when  they  leave  us  most  mournful  over  the  empti- 
ness  of   the    world.      One   can   see   how   very   mournful 
Mr.   Hardy's  genius   is  if  one  compares  it  with  that  of 
Browning,  his  master  in  the   art  of  the  dramatic   lyric. 
Browning  is  also  a  poet  of  frustrated  lovers.     One  can 
remember   poem  after   poem  of   his   with  a  theme   that 
might    easily    have    served    for    Mr.    Hardy— Foo    Late, 
Cristina,   The  Lost  Mistress,  The  Last  Ride   Together, 
The   Statue  and  the   Bust,   to   name   a  few.      But  what 
a   sense   of   triumph   there    is    in   Browning's   tragedies  ! 
Even  when  he  writes  of  the  feeble -hearted,  as   in    The 
Statue  and  the  Bust,  he  leaves  us  with  the  feeling  that 
we  are  in  the  presence  of  weakness  in  a  world  in  which 
courage  prevails.     His  world  is  a  place  of  opulence,  not 
of    poverty.      Compare    The    Last    Ride    Together   with 


MR.    THOMAS   11  Alii )y  '237 

Mr.  Hardy's  The  Phantom  Horscwonuin,  and  you  \\\\\ 
see  a  vast  energy  and  beauty  issuing  from  loss  in  the 
one,  while  in  the  other  there  is  little  but  a  sad  shadow. 
To  have  loved  even  for  aii  hour  is  with  lirowning  to 
live  for  ever  after  in  the  inlieritance  of  a  mighty  achieve- 
ment. To  have  loved  for  an  hour  is,  in  Mr.  Hardy's 
imagination,  to  have  deepened  the  sadness  even  more 
than  the  beauty  of  one's  memories. 

Not  that  Mr.  Hardy's  is  quite  so  miserable  a  genius 
as  is  commonly  supposed.  It  is  false  to  picture  him 
as  always  on  his  knees  before  the  grave-worm.  His 
faith  in  beauty  and  joy  may  be  only  a  thin  llame,  but 
it  is  never  extinguished.  His  beautiful  lyric,  /  Look 
into  my  Glass,  is  the  cry  of  a  soul  dark  but  not  utterly 
darkened  : — 

I  look  into  my  glass, 

And  view  my  wasting  skin, 

And  say  :  "  Would  God,  it  came  to  pass 

My  heart  had  shrunk  as  tliin  !  " 

For  then,  I,  undistrest. 
By  hearts  grown  cold  to  me. 
Could  lonely  wait  my  endless  rest 
With  equanimity. 

But  Time,  to  make  me  grieve. 
Part  steals,  lets  part  abide  ; 
And  shakes  this  fragile  frame  at  eve 
With  throbbings  of  noontide. 

That  is  certainly  worlds  apart  from  the  unquenchable 
joy  of  Browning's  "  All  the  breath  and  the  bloom  of  the 
world  in  the  bag  of  one  bee  "  ;  but  it  is  also  far  removed 
from  the  "  Lo  1  you  may  always  end  it  where  you 
will  "  of  The  City  of  Dreadjul  Night.  And  ilcspair  is 
by  no  means  triumphant  in  what  is  perhaps  the  most 
attractive  of  all  Mr.  Hardy's  poems,  The  Oxen  :— 

Christmas  Eve,  and  twelve  of  the  clock, 
"  Now  they  are  all  on  their  knees." 
'  An  elder  said  as  we  sat  in  a  flock 

By  the  embers  in  hearthside  ease. 


238  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

We  pictured  the  meek  mild  creatures  where 

They  dwelt  in  their  strawy  pen. 
Nor  did  it  occur  to  one  of  us  there 

To  doubt  they  were  kneeling  then. 

So  fair  a  fancy  few  would  weave 

In  these  years  !     Yet,  I  feel. 
It  some  one  said  on  Christmas  Eve, 

"  Come  ;  see  the  oxen  kneel 

"  In  the  lonely  barton  by  yonder  coomb 

Our  childhood  used  to  know," 
I  should  go  with  him  in  the  gloom. 

Hoping  it  might  be  so. 

The  mood  of  faith,  however — ^or,  rather,  of  dehght  in 
the  memory  of  faith — is  not  Mr.  Hardy's  prevailing  mood. 
At  the  same  time,  his  imfaith  relates  to  the  duration 
of  love  rather  than  to  human  destiny.  He  believes 
in  "  the  world's  amendment."  He  can  enter  upon  a 
war  without  ironical  doubts,  as  we  see  in  the  song 
Men  who  March  Away.  More  than  this,  he  can  look 
forward  beyond  war  to  the  coming  of  a  new  patriotism 
of  the  world.  "  How  long,"  he  cries,  in  a  poem  written 
some  years  ago  : — 

How  long,  O  ruling  Teutons,  Slavs,  and  Gaels, 

Must  your  wroth  reasonings  trade  on  lives  like  these. 

That  are  as  puppets  in  a  playing  hand  ? 

When  shall  the  saner  softer  polities 

Whereof  we  dream,  have  sway  in  each  proud  land. 

And  Patriotism,  grown  Godlike,  scorn  to  stand 

Bondslave  to  realms,  but  circle  earth  and  seas  ? 

But,  perhaps,  his  characteristic  attitude  to  war  is  to 
be  found,  not  in  lines  like  these,  but  in  that  melancholy 
poem,  The  Souls  of  the  Slain,  in  which  the  souls  of 
the  dead  soldiers  return  to  their  country  and  question 
a  "  senior  soul-flame  "  as  to  how  their  friends  and 
relatives  have  kept  their  doughty  deeds  in  remem- 
brance : — 


MR.    THOMAS   HARDY  239 


"  And,  General,  how  huld  out  our  swcclhcartb. 
Sworn  loyal  as  doves  ?  " 
"  Many  mourn  ;  many  think 
It  is  not  unattractive  to  prink 
Them  in  sable  for  heroes.     Some  fickle  and  Heet  hearts 
Have  found  them  new  loves  " 

"  And  our  wives  ?  "  quoth  an(jther,  resignedly, 
"  Dwell  they  on  our  deeds  ?  " 
"  Deeds  of  home  ;  that  live  yet 
Fresh  as  new — deeds  of  fondness  or  fret, 
Ancient  words  that  were  kindly  expressed  or  unkindly, 
These,  these  have  their  heeds." 

Mr.  Hardy  has  too  bitter  a  sense  of  reality  to  believe 
much  in  the  glory  of  war.  His  imagination  has  always 
been  curiously  interested  in  soldiers,  but  that  is  more 
because  they  have  added  a  touch  of  colour  to  the  tragic 
game  of  hfe  than  because  he  is  on  the  side  of  the  military 
show.  One  has  only  to  read  The  Dynasts  along  with 
Barrack-room  Ballads  to  see  that  the  attitude  of  Mr. 
Hardy  to  war  is  the  attitude  of  the  brooding  artist  in 
contrast  with  that  of  the  music-hall  politician.  Not 
that  Mr.  Kipling  did  not  tell  us  some  truths  about  the 
fate  of  our  fellows,  but  he  related  them  to  an  atmosphere 
that  savoured  of  beer  and  tobacco  rather  than  of  eternity. 
The  real  world  to  Mr.  Hardy  is  the  world  of  ancient 
human  things,  in  which  war  has  come  to  be  a  hideous 
irrelevance.  That  is  what  he  makes  emphatically  clear 
in  In  the  Time  of  the  Breaking  of  Nations  :  — 

Only  a  man  harrowing  clods 

In  a  slow  silent  walk 
With  an  old  horse  that  stumbles  ami  nods 

Half  asleep  as  they  stalk. 

Only  thin  smoke  without  flame 

From  the  heaps  of  couch  grass  : 
Yet  this  will  go  onward  the  same 

Though  Dynasties  pass. 

Yonder  a  maid  and  her  wight 

Come  whispering  by  ; 
War's  annals  will  fade  into  night 

Ere  their  story  die 


240  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 

It  may  be  thought,  on  the  other  hand,  that  Mr. 
Hardy's  poems  about  war  are  no  more  expressive  of 
tragic  futility  than  his  poems  about  love.  Futility  and 
frustration  are  ever-recurring  themes  in  both.  His  lovers, 
like  his  soldiers,  rot  in  the  grave  defeated  of  their  glory. 
Lovers  are  always  severed  both  in  life  and  in  death  : — 

Rain  on  the  windows,  creaking  doors, 

With  blasts  that  besom  the  green. 
And  I  am  here,  and  you  are  there. 

And  a  hundred  miles  between  ! 

In  Beyond  the  Last  Lamp  we  have  the  same  mournful 
cry  over  severance.  There  are  few  sadder  poems  than 
this  with  its  tristful  refrain,  even  in  the  works  of  Mr. 
Hardy.  It  is  too  long  to  quote  in  full,  but  one  may- 
give  the  last  verses  of  this  lyric  of  lovers  in  a  lane  : — 

Wlien  I  re-trod  that  watery  way 
Some  hours  beyond  the  droop  of  day. 
Still  I  found  pacing  there  the  twain 

Just  as  slowly,  just  as  sadly. 

Heedless  of  the  night  and  rain. 
One  could  but  wonder  who  they  were 
And  what  wild  woe  detained  them  there. 

Though  thirty  years  of  blur  and  blot 
Have  slid  since  I  beheld  that  spot. 
And  saw  in  curious  converse  there 

Moving  slowly,  moving  sadly. 

That  mysterious  tragic  pair, 
Its  olden  look  may  linger  on — 
All  but  the  couple  ;  they  have  gone. 

Whither  ?     Who  knows,  indeed.  .  .  .  And  yet 
To  me,  when  nights  are  weird  and  wet. 
Without  those  comrades  there  at  tryst 

Creeping  slowly,  creeping  sadly. 

That  love-lane  does  not  exist. 
There  they  seem  brooding  on  their  pain. 
And  will,  while  such  a  lane  remain. 

And  death  is  no  kinder  than  life  to  lovers  : — 


MR.   THOMAS  HARDY  241 


I  shall  rot  here,  with  those  whom  in  their  day 

You  never  knew. 
And  aUcn  ones  who,  ere  tliey  tliillcd  to  clay. 

Met  not  my  view, 
Will  in  yon  distant  gravc-placc  ever  neighbour  you. 

No  shade  of  pinnacle  or  tree  or  tower, 

While  earth  endures. 
Will  fall  on  my  mound  and  within  the  hour 

Steal  on  to  yours  ; 
One  robin  never  haunt  our  two  green  covertures. 

Mr.  Hardy,  fortunately,  has  the  genius  to  express  the 
burden  and  the  mystery  even  of  a  world  grey  with 
rain  and  commonplace  in  achievement.  There  is  a  beauty 
of  sorrow  in  these  poems  in  which  "  life  with  the  sad, 
seared  face  "  mirrors  itself  without  disguise.  They  bring 
us  face  to  face  with  an  experience  intenser  than  our 
own.  There  is  nothing  common  in  the  tragic  image  of 
dullness  in  A  Common-place  Day  :— 

The  day  is  turning  ghost, 
And  scuttles  from  the  kalendar  in  fits  and  furtively, 

To  join  the  anonymous  host 
Of  those  that  throng  oblivion  ;    ceding  his  place,  maybe, 

To  one  of  like  degree.  .  .  . 


-r>' 


Nothing  of  tiniest  worth 
Have  I  wrought,  pondered,  planned  ;    no  one  thing  asking  blame 
or  praise. 

Since  the  pale  corpse-like  birth 
Of  this  diurnal  unit,  bearing  blanks  in  all  its  rays — 

Dullest  of  duU-hued  days  1 

Wanly  upon  the  panes 
The  rain  shdes,  as  have  slid  since  mom  my  colourless  thoughts  . 
and  yet 

Here,  while  Day's  presence  wanes. 
And  over  him  the  sepulchre-lid  is  slowly  lowered  and  set, 

He  wakens  my  regret. 

In  the  poem  which  contains  these  verses  tlic  emotion  of 
the   poet   gives    words   often    undistinguished   an   almost 

16 


242  OLD   AND   NEW  MASTERS 

Elizabethan  rhythm.  Mr.  Hardy,  indeed,  is  a  poet  who 
often  achieves  music  of  verses,  though  he  seldom 
achieves  music  of  phrase. 

We  must,  then,  be  grateful  without  niggardliness  for 
the  gift  of  his  verse.  On  the  larger  canvas  of  his  prose 
we  find  a  vision  more  abundant,  more  varied,  more 
touched  with  humour.  But  his  poems  are  the  genuine 
confessions  of  a  soul,  the  meditations  of  a  man  of  genius, 
brooding  not  without  bitterness  but  with  pity  on  the 
paths  that  lead  to  the  grave,  and  the  figures  that  flit 
along  them  so  solitarily  and  so  ineffectually. 


2.  A  Poet  in  Winter 

In  the  last  poem  in  his  last  book.  Moments  of  Vis'on, 
Mr.  Hardy  meditates  on  his  own  immortality,  as  all 
men  of  genius  probably  do  at  one  time  or  another. 
Afterwards,  the  poem  in  which  he  does  so,  is  interest- 
ing, not  only  for  this  reason,  but  because  it  contains 
implicitly  a  definition  and  a  defence  of  the  author's 
achievement  in  literature.  The  poem  is  too  long  to 
quote  in  full,  but  the  first  three  verses  will  be  sufficient 
to  illustrate  what  I  have  said  : 

When  the  Present  has  latched  its  postern  behind  my  tremulous 
stay. 

And  the  May  month  flaps  its  glad  green  leaves  like  wings. 
Delicate-filmed  as  new-spun  silk,  will  the  people  say  : 

"  He  was  a  man  who  used  to  notice  such  things  "  ? 

If  it  be  in  the  dusk  when,  like  an  eyelid's  soundless  blink. 
The  dewfall-hawk  comes  crossing  the  shades  to  alight 

Upon  the  wind-warped  upland  thorn,  will  a  gazer  think  : 
"  To  him  this  must  have  been  a  familiar  sight  "  ? 

If  I  pass  during  some  nocturnal  blackness,  mothy  and  warm. 
When  the  hedgehog  travels  furtively  over  the  lawn, 

Will  they  say  :    "  He  strove  that  such  innocent  creatures  should 
come  to  no  harm. 
But  he  could  do  little  for  them  ;  and  now  he  is  gone  "  ? 


MR.    THOMAS   H.1RDY  248 


Even  without  the  two  other  verses,  we  have  here  a 
remarkable  attempt  on  the  part  of  an  artist  to  paint  a 
portrait,  as  it  were,  of  his  own  genius. 

Mr.  Hardy's  genius  is  essentially  that  of  a  man  who 
"  used  to  notice  such  things  "  as  the  fluttering  of  the 
green  leaves  in  May,  and  to  whom  the  swift  passage 
of  a  night-jar  in  the  twilight  has  '*  been  a  familiar 
sight."  He  is  one  of  the  most  sensitive  observers  of 
nature  who  have  written  l^nglish  prose.  It  may  even 
be  that  he  will  be  rememlx^red  longer  for  his  studies 
of  nature  than  for  his  studies  of  human  nature.  His 
days  are  among  his  greatest  characters,  as  in  the  wonder- 
ful scene  on  the  heath  in  the  opening  of  The  Return 
of  the  Native.  He  would  have  written  well  of  the 
world,  one  can  imagine,  even  if  he  had  found  it  un- 
inhabited. But  his  sensitiveness  is  not  merely  sensitive- 
ness of  the  eye  :  it  is  also  sensitiveness  of  the  heart. 
He  has,  indeed,  that  hypersensitive  sort  of  temperament, 
as  the  verse  about  the  hedgehog  sugge.sts,  which  is 
the  victim  at  once  of  pity  and  of  a  feeling  of  hoj)elcss 
helplessness.  Never  anywhere  else  has  there  been  such 
a  world  of  pity  put  into  a  quotation  as  Mr.  Hardy 
has  put  into  that  line  and  a  half  from  The  Two  Gentle- 
men of  Verona,  which  he  placed  on  the  title-page  c/f 
Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles  :— 

Poor  wounded  name,  my  bosom  as  a  bed 
Shall  lodge  thee  ! 

In  the  use  to  which  he  put  these  words  Mr.  Hardy  may 
be  said  to  have  added  to  the  poetry  of  Shidcespcare. 
He  gave  them  a  new  imaginative  context,  and  poured 
his  own  heart  into  them.  For  the  same  helplcb>  pity 
which  he  feels  for  dumb  creatures  he  feels  for  men 
and    women  : 

...  He  strove  that  such  innocent  creatures  should   come   to   no 
harm, 
But  he  could  do  little  for  them 


244  OLD   AND   NEW   MASTERS 


It  is  the  spirit  of  pity  brooding  over  the  landscape  in 
Mr.  Hardy's  books  that  makes  them  an  original  and 
beautiful  contribution  to  literature,  in  spite  of  his  endless 
errors  as  an  artist. 

His  last  book  is  a  reiteration  both  of  his  genius  and 
of  his  errors.  As  we  read  the  hundred  and  sixty  or 
so  poems  it  contains  we  get  the  impression  of  genius 
presiding  over  a  multitude  of  errors.  There  are  not 
half  a  dozen  poems  in  the  book  the  discovery  of  which, 
should  the  author's  name  be  forgotten,  would  send  the 
critics  in  quest  of  other  work  from  the  same  magician's 
hand.  One  feels  safe  in  prophesying  immortality  for 
only  two,  The  Oxen  and  /n  Time  of  "  the  Breaking 
of  Nations  "  ;  and  these  have  already  appeared  in  the 
selection  of  the  author's  poems  published  in  the  Golden 
Treasury  Series.  The  fact  that  the  entirely  new  poems 
contain  nothing  on  the  plane  of  immortality,  however, 
does  not  mean  that  Moments  of  Vision  is  a  book  of 
verse  about  which  one  has  the  right  to  be  indifferent. 
No  writer  who  is  so  concerned  as  Mr.  Hardy  with  setting 
down  what  his  eyes  and  heart  have  told  him  can  be 
regarded  with  indifference.  Mr.  Hardy's  art  is  lame, 
but  it  carries  the  burden  of  genius.  He  may  be  a 
stammerer  as  a  poet,  but  he  stammers  in  words  of 
his  own  concerning  a  vision  of  his  own.  When  he 
notes  the  bird  flying  past  in  the  dusk,  "  like  an  eye- 
lid's soundless  blink,"  he  does  not  achieve  music,  but 
he  chronicles  an  experience,  not  merely  echoes  one,  with 
such  exact  truth  as  to  make  it  immortally  a  part  of  all 
experience.  There  is  nothing  borrowed  or  secondhand, 
again,  in  Mr.  Hardy's  grim  vision  of  the  yew-trees  in 
the   churchyard   by   moonlight   in   Jubilate  : 

The  yew-tree  arms,  glued  hard  to  the  stiff,  stark  air. 
Hung  still  in  the  village  sky  as  theatre-scenes. 

Mr.  Hardy  may  not  enable  us  to  hear  the  music  which 
is  more  than  the  music  of  the  earth,  but  he  enables  us 
to   see   what   he  saw.      He   communicates   his  spectacle 


MR.   THOMAS   ILIIiUY  '245 


of  the  world.  He  builds  his  hoiiso  lopsidrd.  h.irsli, 
and  with  the  windows  in  unusual  places  ;  but  it  is  lii^ 
own  house,  the  house  of  a  seer,  of  a  jxirsoruility.  That 
is  what  we  are  aware  of  in  such  a  poem  as  On  Stur- 
minster  Foot  Bridge,  in  which  perfect  and  precise  obser- 
vation of  nature  is  allied  to  intolerably  prosaic  utter- 
ance.     The  first  verse  of  this  poem   runs  : 

Reticulations  creep  upon  the  slack  stream's  face 

When  the  wind  skims  irritably  past. 
The  current  clucks  smartly  into  each  hullow  place 
That  years  of  flood  have  scrabbled  in  the  pier's  sodden  base  ; 
The  floating-lily  leaves  rot  fast. 

One  could  make  as  good  music  as  that  out  of  a  milk- 
cart.  One  would  accept  such  musicless  verse  only  from 
a  man  of  genius.  But  even  here  Mr.  Hardy  takes 
us  home  with  him  and  makes  us  stand  by  his  side  and 
hsten  to  the  clucking  stream.  He  takes  us  home  with 
him  again  in  the  poem  called  Overlooking  the  River 
St  our,    which    begins  : 

The  swallows  flew  in  the  curves  of  an  ei^lit 

Above  the  river-gleam 

In  the  wet  June's  last  beam  : 
Like  little  crossbows  animate, 
The  swallows  flew  in  the  curves  of  an  eight 

Above  the  river-gleam. 

Planing  up  shavings  made  of  spray, 

A  moor-hen  darted  out 

From  the  bank  thereabout, 
And  through  the  stream-shine  ripped  her  way  ; 
Planing  up  shavings  made  of  spray, 

A  moor-hen  darted  out. 

In  this  poem  we  find  observation  leaping  into  song  in 
one  line  aiiji  hobbling  into  a  hard-wrought  image  in 
another.  Both  the  line  in  which  the  first  appears, 
however — 

Lik«  little  crossbows  animate, 


246  OLD  AND   NEW  MASTERS 


and  the  line   in  which  the  second  happens — 
Planing  up  shavings  made  of  spray, 

equally  make  us  feel  how  watchful  and  earnest  an  observer 
is  Mr.  Hardy.  He  is  a  man,  we  realize,  to  whom  bird 
and  river,  heath  and  stone,  road  and  field  and  tree, 
mean  immensely  more  than  to  his  fellows.  I  do  not 
suggest  that  he  observes  nature  without  bias — that  he 
mirrors  the  procession  of  visible  things  with  the  delight 
of  a  child  or  a  lyric  poet.  He  makes  nature  his  mirror 
as  well  as  himself  a  mirror  of  nature.  He  colours  it 
with  all  his  sadness,  his  helplessness,  his  (if  one  may 
invent  the  word  and  use  it  without  offence)  warpedness. 
If  I  am  not  mistaken,  he  once  compared  a  bleak  morn- 
ing in  The  Woodtanders  to  the  face  of  a  still-born 
baby.  He  loves  to  dwell  on  the  uncomfortable  moods 
of    nature — on    such    things    as  : — 

.  .  .  the  watery  hght 
Of  the  moon  in  its  old  age  ; 

concerning  which  moon  he  goes  on  to  describe  how  : 

Green-rheumed  clouds  were  hurrying  past  where  mute  and  cold 

it  globed 
Like  a  dying  dolphin's  eye  seen  through  a  lapping  wave 

This,  I  fear,  is  a  failure,  but  it  is  a  failure  in  a  common 
mood  of  the  author's.  It  is  a  mood  in  which  nature  looks 
out  at  us,  almost  ludicrous  in  its  melancholy.  In  such 
a  poem  as  that  from  which  I  have  quoted,  it  is  as  though 
we  saw  nature  with  a  drip  on  the  end  of  its  nose. 
Mr.  Hardy's  is  something  different  from  a  tragic  vision. 
It  is  a  desolate,  disheartening,  and,  in  a,  way,  morbid 
vision.     We  wander  with  him  too  often  under — 

Gaunt  trees  that  interlace, 
Through  whose  flayed  fingers  I  see  too  clearly 
The  nakedness  of  the  place. 


MR.    THOMAS   IIAh'DV  247 


And  Mr.  Hardy's  vision  ol  ihc  lilt-  (»f  iii«ii  ,iiid  wdmicii 
transgresses  similarly  into  a  denial  ul  ^ladm-ss.  His 
gloom,  we  feel,  goes  too  far.  It  goes  so  far  that  we 
are  tempted  at  times  to  think  of  it  as  a  factitious  gloom. 
He  writes  a  poem  called  Honeynwon  Time  at  an  Inn, 
and  this  is  the  characteristic  atmosphere  in  wlii(  h  he 
introduces  us  to  the  bridegroom  and   bride  : 

At  the  shiver  of  morning,  a  httle  before  the  false  dawn, 
The  moon  was  at  the  window-square, 
Deedily  brooding  in  deformed  decay — 
The  curve  hewn  off  her  cheek  as  by  an  adze  ; 
At  the  shiver  of  moining,  a  httle  before  the  false  dawn. 
So  the  moon  looked  in  there. 

There  are  no  happy  lovers  or  happy  marriages  in  Mr. 
Hardy's  world.  Such  people  as  are  happy  would  not 
be  happy  if  only  they  knew  the  truth.  Many  of  Mr. 
Hardy^'s  poems  are,  as  I  have  already  said,  dramatic 
lyrics  on  the  pattern  invented  by  Robert  Browning — 
short  stories  in  verse.  But  there  is  a  certain  air  of 
triumph  even  in  Browning's  tragic  figures.  Mr.  Hardy's 
figures  are  the  inmates  of  despair.  Browning's  love- 
poems  belong  to  heroic  literature.  Mr.  Hardy's  love- 
poems  belong  to  the  literature  of  downhearlctlness. 
Browning's  men  and  women  are  men  and  women  who 
have  had  the  courage  of  their  love,  or  who  are  shown 
at  least  against  a  background  of  Browning's  own  coinage. 
Mr.  Hardy's  men  and  women  do  not  know  the  wild 
faith  of  love.  They  have  not  the  courage  even  of  their 
sins.  They  are  helpless  as  fishes  in  a  net— a  scarcely 
rebellious  population  of  the  ill -matched  and  the  ill- 
starred. 

Many  of  the  poems  in  his  last  book  fail  through  a  lack 
of  imaginative  energy.  It  is  imaginative  energy  that 
makes  the  reading  of  a  great  tragedy  like  King  I  car 
not  a  depressing,  but  an  exalting  experience.  But  is 
there  anything  save  depression  to  be  got  from  reading 
such  a  poem  as  A  Caged  Goldfinch  :— 


248  OLD  AND  NEW  MASTERS 

Within  a  churchyard,  on  a  recent  grave, 

I  saw  a  little  cage 
That  jailed  a  goldfinch.     All  was  silence,  save 

Its  hops  from  stage  to  stage. 

There  was  inquiry  in  its  wistful  eye. 

And  once  it  tried  to  sing  ; 
Of  him  or  her  who  placed  it  there,  and  why. 

No  one  knew  anything. 

True,  a  woman  was  found  drowned  the  day  ensuing. 

And  some  at  times  averred 
The  grave  to  be  her  false  one's,  who  when  wooing 

Gave  her  the  bird. 

Apart  even  from  the  ludicrous  associations  which  modern 
slang  has  given  the  last  phrase,  making  it  look  like  a 
queer  pun,  this  poem  seems  to  one  to  dri\'e  sorrow  over 
the  edge  of  the  ridiculous.  That  goldfinch  has  surely- 
escaped  from  a  Max-Beerbohm  parody.  Tlie  ingenuity 
with  vi^hich  Mr.  Hardy  plots  tragic  situations  for  his 
characters  in  some  of  his  other  poems  is,  indeed,  in 
repeated  danger  of  misleading  him  into  parody.  One  of 
his  poems  tells,  for  instance,  how  a  stranger  finds  an 
old  man  scrubbing  a  Statue  of  Liberty  in  a  city  square, 
and,  hearing  he  does  it  for  love,  hails  him  as  "  Liberty's 
knight  divine."  The  old  man  confesses  that  he  does  not 
care  twopence  for  Liberty,  and  declares  that  he  keeps 
the  statue  clean  in  memory  of  his  beautiful  daughter, 
who  had  sat  as  a  model  for  it — a  girl  fair  in  fame  as 
in  form.  In  the  interests  of  his  plot  and  his  dismal 
philosophy,  Mr.  Hardy  identifies  the  stranger  with  the 
sculptor  of  the  statue,  and  dismisses  us  with  his  blighting 
aside  on  the  old  man's  credulous  love  of  his  dead  dausrhter : 


'to' 


Answer  I  gave  not.     Of  that  form 

The  carver  was  I  at  his  side  ; 
His  child  my  model,  held  so  saintly, 
Grand  in  feature. 
Gross  in  nature. 
In  the  dens  of  vice  had  died. 


This  is  worse  than  optimism. 


MR.    THOMAS   HARDY  249 

It   is  only   tair   to   say    that,   thougli    poem   after   |xhmm 
— including  the  one  about  the  fat  young  man  whom  tin- 
doctors   gave   only   six   months   to   live  unlt-ss  he   walkrd 
a  great  deal,  and  who  thercfure  was  conij)clled  to  refuse 
a  drive  in  the  poet's  phaeton,  though   night  was  closing 
over   the   heath — dramatizes   the   meaningless   miseries  of 
hfe,   there    is   also   to   be   found    in  some   of   the  poems 
a   faint    sunset-glow   of   hope,    almost    of    faith.      There 
have   been   compensations,   we   realize    in    /    Travel  as   a 
Phantom   Now,   even   in   this    world   of    skeletons.      Mr. 
Hardy's    fatalism    concerning    God    seems    not    very    far 
from    faith    in    God    in    that    beautiful    Christmas    poem, 
The    Oxen.      Still,   the  ultimate  mood   of   the  poems   is 
not    faith.      It    is   one   of   pity   so   despairing  as  to   be 
almost    nihilism.      There    is   mockery    in    it    without    the 
merriment  of  mockery.     The  general  atmosphere  of  the 
poems,  it  seems  to  me,  is  to  be  found  perfectly  expressed 
in   the   last   three   lines  of   one   of  the    poems,   which  is 
about  a  churchyard,  a  dead  woman,  a   living  rival,  and 
the  ghost  of  a  soldier  : 

There  was  a  cry  by  the  white-flowered  mound, 
There  was  a  laugh  from  underground. 
There  was  a  deeper  gloom  around. 

How  much  of  the  art  of  Thomas  Hardy  is  suggested  in 
those  lines  !  The  laugh  from  underground,  the  deeper 
gloom— are  they  not  all  but  omnipresent  throughout  his 
later  and  greatest  work?  The  war  could  not  deepen  such 
pessimism.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Mr.  Hardy's  war  poetry 
is  more  cheerful,  because  more  heroic,  than  his  poetry 
about  the  normal  world.  Destiny  was  already  crueller 
than  any  war-lord.  The  Prussian,  to  such  an  imagination, 
could  be  no  more  than  a  fly— a  poisonous  fly— on  the 
wheel  of   destiny's   disastrous   car. 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by 

VHWIN  BROTHERS,  LIMITED 

WOKING  AND  LONDON 


University  of  California 

SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 

305  De  Neve  Drive  -  Parking  Lot  17  •   Box  951388 

LOS  ANGELES,  CALIFORNIA  90095-1388 

Return  this  material  to  the  library  from  which  it  was  borrowed. 


AA    000  577  6 


m'l'''.tj.i.\{>.i 


